If Underworld was primarily responsible for bringing DeLillo into worldwide critical consideration, his new global audiences have not stopped reading him. Once the darling of a coterie of American academics, DeLillo now belongs to the world.

This chapter provides a framework for the companion by defining world crime fiction and outlining the key theoretical issues involved in studying crime fiction as a global genre. The first section explores the global and transnational prehistories of crime fiction; it covers various forms of premodern crime writing and discusses the global dissemination of Western crime fiction from the late nineteenth century, highlighting the role of translation, pseudotranslation and adaptation in the emergence of local crime literatures. The second section focusses on the transnationalism of contemporary world crime fiction, arguing that the global adaptations of the genre are not just a matter of adding local colour, but involve formal hybridization that results in new, local versions of the genre. The final section discusses how crime fiction studies, as a field traditionally tied to Western crime writing, has recently moved towards a global and transnational conception of the genre. The overarching argument of the chapter is that founding world crime fiction as a research area requires a rethinking of the crime genre itself beyond the Anglocentrism of the scholarly tradition.

Scandinavian countries have gone from mostly importing crime fiction to being, in the twenty-first century, the genre’s lead exporters. The chapter considers this transnationalization from three perspectives, showing how Scandinavian crime writing adapts international genres to local concerns, how notable examples of the genre engage with the wider world, and how novels and TV series circulate within transnational networks. It argues that Scandinavian crime fiction is bound up with transnational and transmedial networks of influence, appropriation and innovation. Sjöwall and Wahlöö’s procedurals reflect popular geopolitics while their proto-typical Scandinavian cop longs for a Swedish welfare utopia. Cross-border crimes in works by Henning Mankell, Anne Holt and Peter Høeg critique global structures of social and racial inequality and challenge the demarcation between the local and the global. More recent global bestsellers by Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø employ hybrid genres to tell stories of a globalizing world where the relationship between the welfare state and global neoliberalism, and between the bounded nation and an increasingly transnational world are key ingredients.

This chapter articulates what it calls a ‘planetary poetics’. To set the stage for his presentation, Moraru underscores that not only are ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ hardly equivalent, but they are not givens either. Rather, he argues, ‘globe’ and ‘planet’ are products, something done to the world, made in and out of it. World-making and remaking forms, they are outcomes of worlding, that is, of highly complex, interrelated changes leading to intensified and vastly transformative interactions of the world’s various parts economically, culturally and otherwise, much though the same world’s animate and inanimate systems, at whose expense socio-economic growth and integration have been de facto unfolding, have been concomitantly coming under unprecedented threat or even disintegrating. Where a certain poverty of the critical imagination limits standard takes on the late global era to self-congratulatory ‘uncovering’ of the world-as-globe realities, Moraru’s planetary approach enriches this conventional critical vista by recovering a more nuanced, present-grounded yet future-oriented picture. A record of world-making or world-poiesis, this picture lends itself to a reading whose job is a reverse engineering of sort of planetary poetics by attending to the worldings that have led to the world geocultural aggregate as we know it.

Literary innovation and geographical expansion often depend on mass extinction of literary forms. Ecological catastrophe strikes as cross-regional climate change, epidemic, or geological disaster. Sometimes aided by prior globalizing steps but always intertwined with social and cultural forces, it curtails population, globalization, literacy, and literature; delegitimates the old order; and undermines dominant literary modes. But when ecological conditions are again favorable, previously marginal literary forms come to prominence, a new cultural age emerges, and literary globalization advances. Literary history is shaped by this recurrent alternation. From 3300 BCE to 400 CE, climate change—aridity and global cooling—is the dominant ecological shock. From 150 to 1560 CE, these disruptive forces, together with volcanic eruptions, often set the stage for a hitherto unknown scourge, a new key driver made possible by increasing globalization—the pandemic. Beginning in the late 16th century, however, pandemics relatively recede. Climate change again dominates, first as global cooling, now as global heating. Throughout, ecological catastrophe is arguably the central force of creative destruction—temporarily undermining literature and literary globalization, ultimately enabling literary innovation and diffusion.

This chapter begins from the historical conjecture that, at the level of social and political geography, globalization is best defined by the practical and symbolic parcellisation of social and political space, not through metaphors of borderlessness. Such parcellisation is epitomised by the proliferation of actual enclaves zones such as business parks, gated communities, refugee camps and export processing zones. They also have their fantasy versions, such as the so-called No-Go Zones that, political activists and commenters have alleged, represent areas of effective Muslim secession from secular states such as Britain and France. The chapter considers empirical and theoretical evidence for the break-up of global social space. It concludes by showing how these spaces become important formal and thematic topoi in contemporary literary works by J. G. Ballard, Ali Smith and Caryl Phillips. Other authors discussed include John Berger and Joseph O’Neill.

The introduction provides an overview of the ways in which globalization can be defined and how this relates to literary studies. It sets out the book’s main approach, which is to view literature as being a key factor that shapes actual and imagined global phenomena. It also provides an overview of each of the books sections and chapters, flagging up connections between these and showing how they link in with other key fields of enquiry.

This chapter surveys the now well-known notion of the end of history, popularized in particular by Francis Fukuyama, from a literary point of view. It does this, in the main, by looking at the work of the philologist Erich Auerbach. It begins with an overview of the idea of the end of history from the more general, historical viewpoint of eschatology, outlining some of the ways this notion seems to be becoming redundant in the contemporay era. It then moves on to trace the history of eschatological thinking via Auerbach’s corpus, making links between this author’s different works, and explicating how they relate to the main topic. If all escahtological narratives have a global dimension, Auerbach’s work also highlights the way in which the end of history is tied up with more specific notions of globalization, both in the imperialist era and in our own era of thoroughgoing globalization. The chapter thus sets about trying to think through the link between globalization, the end of history and literature, and it ends by drawing some conclusions on how these three things relate to one another in the contemporary era.

Globalization in clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease (AD) drug development has increased rapidly. It would substantially support persons with dementia to access novel therapeutics in a coordinated and efficient manner. In this chapter, we overview the significant drives of globalization in AD drug development: the growth of the world’s AD population, the need for a larger sample in trials to secure enrollment in the required timeframe, and the ethnographic and ethnobiological contributors. We also discuss the major issues relevant to global trials: the geographic variation across trial sites, the differences in study participants, and the lack of harmonized global regulatory mechanisms. In the end, this chapter recommends that improving site performance, enhancing infrastructure development, and promoting universal regulatory mechanism should be prioritized to maximize the contribution of globalization to the AD drug development ecosystem.

While interest in Democracy in America has been centered in the West, James T. Schleifer describes in this chapter how Japanese interest in Democracy in America began as early as the late nineteenth century during the period of the Meiji Restoration. By way of contrast, Chinese interest in Tocqueville’s writings emerged only in the past few decades and has focused more on his Old Regime and the Revolution. These two case studies are exemplary of growing international interest in Tocqueville’s writings as thinkers outside the West wrestle with his lessons about the future possibilities of equality, political rights, and democratic liberty.

Alexis de Tocqueville is often described as a critic of American culture and modern democracy. Yet, as Alan Levine argues, there is an important difference between Tocqueville’s friendly criticisms of parts of American culture he finds wanting and other ideological critiques by “anti-American” thinkers such as Martin Heidegger and the Frankfurt School. Several factors separate Tocqueville from this European tradition of “Anti-Americanism.” Tocqueville’s criticisms are balanced by an appreciation of the virtues of American democracy and a recognition that these defects are hardly unique to America. His criticisms also take their root in empirical considerations of the complexities of American culture. Although the Frankfurt School and other influential critics often claim Tocqueville as inspiration for their complaints about mass society, they are ideologically motivated, ignore America’s redeeming virtues, and fault America uniquely for widely shared flaws of modernity.

Chapter 28 provides an overview history of translation and interpreting activity through the second millennium in Africa, the Americas (the ‘New World’), Asia (China, India, Japan, Turkey) and the Old World. The chapter concludes with a section on the twentieth century that links the professionalization of translation, terminology and interpretation with the development of transnational organizations (e.g. UNESCO: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) and supranational unions (e.g. the European Union) in the aftermath of World War II, along with continued globalization and technological progress.

In the wake of the pandemic, a new world is in the making. There can be no returning to the old world before Covid-19. In this new pandemic world, trade and trade rules are challenged along with all the other foundations of postwar liberal internationalism. The WTO rules that help link trade remain necessary. New rules are urgently needed to address the links between trade and nature and between trade and other aspects of sustainable development. New rules are equally needed to help spur a green recovery from the economic collapse caused by the pandemic.

The law of neutrality introduces a concomitant set of rights and obligations between belligerents and neutrals. The law as it has settled at the turn of the twentieth century has remained the same in relation to its basic principles, and it has easily adapted to the evolution of the law of the sea, globalized trade and arms technology. The intrusiveness of belligerent practice in the form of exclusion zones, navicerts and distance blockade has become part of the law provided that it does not deviate from the humanitarian law of armed conflict. Moreover, the four Geneva Conventions and the First Additional Protocol admit a humanitarian role for neutral States.