HOW MIGHT WE write contemporary literary history from the medieval perspective in the age of world literature? It may seem unexpected, unorthodox, and almost incongruous to do so by taking up the question of the chansons de geste, the French ‘epic’ of the Middle Ages. If that is at all possible, it is because Sarah Kay laid the ambitious groundwork in her 1995 Political Fictions, when she tethered the critical study of individual texts ‘to the wider project of contributing to medieval French literary history by re-examining the relationship between the chansons de geste and romance’ (Political Fictions: 1). She interrogated the neglect (and contempt) of the chansons de geste in favour of the romance genre, showed the mutual connections and influences between the genres, and introduced the radically transformative notion of ‘simultaneity’ of romance and chanson de geste in history, thereby rewriting the traditional linear, genealogical, and teleological discourse of literary history that saw medieval epic literature give birth to romance, orality to writing, and verse to prose. Yet the general perception in the West, despite contestations, is that we live today in the age of romance: the novel, seen as the heir of medieval romance, is the dominant genre of contemporary world literary production and of the world translation market. The epic is squarely seen as a genre of the past. At best, the term may be used today as an adjective to describe, for instance, a narrative quality: a novel or film may thus be qualified as having ‘epic’ proportions. How timely, if at all relevant, then, is the invocation of the epic genre, what is more the medieval European epic, to the articulation of the literary theory of world literature? In other words, how might the task that Kay's book defined for medievalists be extended, beyond the writing of the ‘French literary history’, to world literary history and our future writing of it?

One way in which world literary history has contested this largely Eurocentric claim of the novel's dominance has been to bring in examples from outside the Western literary tradition and to demonstrate the coexistence of the two models of epic and novel throughout history and across the globe (Dimock 2006).