The relation between center and periphery is an epistemological question that guides a large part of historical discussions in Brazilian criticism and establishes the understanding of national characteristics in opposition to the hegemonic tendencies coming from the outside, namely from Europe and the United States, in particular. It is impossible to understand the discussions around the national question in literature and art since independence without considering this comparative mirror, a necessary condition for identifying differences and recognizing similarities among Brazilian authors and their influences from international canonical models, or from an effectively existing world literature (Weltliteratur). It is clear that the aforementioned relation is not established only among books, that behind it there is the structure of the publishing industry whose expansion introduced literary forms and themes mainly in the novel's attainment of hegemony, as Franco Moretti demonstrated in his famous study of the geography of the nineteenth-century novel (Atlas of the European Novel).

What would be the role, then, if any, of literature produced in Brazil in relation to a Weltliteratur, which Goethe considered to be the necessary future and destiny of German literature? Today, the field of world literature is successfully emerging as an unprecedented success and becoming the lifesaver for the main university programs of comparative literature. In one of his pioneering works on the theme, “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000), the critic Franco Moretti tries to model a theory on the world expansion of the European novel that is inspired by Darwinian evolutionism and by Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory and economic history. Moretti thinks of world literature in parallel to world capitalism as a system that is both “one” and “unequal,” and which developed in the expansion of the center to the periphery. By dominating or subjugating and even eliminating traditional genres and forms, such a system thus accompanies the political and economic development of colonization and neocolonization by creating roots in cultures with less history and tradition, on the one hand, and inspiring creativity, on the other, but only after overcoming the first derivative resistances.