The present volume sketches the innovative field of comparative literary and cultural globalization studies. Its focus lies on the 'global imaginary' - the stock of images, narratives, and tropes that allow us to envisage the world in its unicity. How do literature and the arts contribute to this 'global imaginary'? The texts assembled in the volume proceed from the assumption that literature and the arts do not merely mirror or reproduce a given world, rather, they produce and construct globality. The aim of the volume is to analyse literary and artistic modes of representing and producing 'the world' in their historical diversity. Furthermore, it strives to correlate forms of literary world-production to the construction of globality in other media. Particular attention is paid to the interconnections between literary / artistic world constructions and the social, economic and political aspects of globalisation processes.