World literature and global English

In the early part of the twenty-first century, English is the nearest thing the planet has to a global language. English has only about 360 million people for whom it is their first language, a relatively small number, but it has around two billion for whom it is a second language. In the context of Western cultural history, the idea of a global language is, of course, by no means a recent phenomenon. Alexander Beecroft has observed that Latin enjoyed a status as an intellectual lingua franca in Europe well into the seventeenth century, with a majority of the books produced by Oxford University Press between 1690 and 1710 being published in Latin. Operating on points of conjunction across different spatial and philosophical vectors, both world literature and global English offer the prospect of opening up circumscribed domains or enclosed states to the wider trajectory of the planet.