The question of literary history and the nation—the question that animates the essays collected in this issue of MLQ—often seems as old as literature itself. For if literature is what is taught, and this teaching takes place within institutions and structures, then the organization of the literary as an object of study always seems to demand a historical accounting of its coming into being and a justification of its work within cultural formations—regional, national, or global. The earliest histories of many literatures are motivated by the need to mark out boundaries of language and culture that differentiate nations from one another, even when realities on the ground affirm the essentially transnational nature of literature itself. So, literary history finds itself in a perpetual dilemma: it deals with objects of analysis that exist outside borders, yet the institution of literature demands national boundaries and historical periods. Literature thrives because it does not know borders, yet literary history is motivated by the belief that it is only when delimited that literature can have an identity. We find it easier to talk about a German, French, or Russian literature so long as it is confined to a national boundary, but we struggle to account for the literatures in those languages that exist outside borders. There are even instances when literatures produced through globalizing enterprises such as commerce and empire are reduced to a national literary history against all logic. What are we to do with literature in Arabic, which started as what Beatrice Gruendler (2015: 92) calls “nobody’s native tongue”; was produced in a language spoken across continents; yet finds itself defined in national terms—as Lebanese, Egyptian, or Syrian?In situations like these, one could easily conclude that the concordance between a literature and a nation, the bounding of literature, as it were, is often a myth that conceals the linguistic dynamics that characterize literary work and what one may call the oppositional work of literature (see Chambers 1991: 6–18; During 1990: 138–43). English literature, for example, is not the literary product of England, for even leaving aside the question of the English literatures that emerged in former British settlements and colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it arises and consolidates its identity before and after the idea of the English nation, often on the so-called Celtic fringe (Scotland, Ireland, and Wales). There are many instances when literature redefines boundaries along lines at odds with political claims. There is, for example, an idea of a German literature that complicates the idea of the German nation-state in places as diverse as Austria, multilingual Switzerland, the former German Democratic Republic, and even what was once Franz Kafka’s Bohemia. The majority of Sesotho speakers and readers—and the bulk of Sotho literature—exists not in the nation of Lesotho but in the Republic of South Africa. How do literary histories of either nation account for the existence of a language and writing that resists borders? How are we to think and write about Malay literature as distinct from a Malaysian literature?These questions are compounded by two other problems taken up in these essays: periodization and time. What sets literary history apart from literary criticism and theory is not just its concern with historicizing literature but its preoccupation with temporal markers and ruptures in what John Frow (1986: 103) calls “an established literary series.” In effect, a literary history comes into being not by insisting on the historicity of a text or genre but by distinguishing itself from what precedes it and by identifying definitive or defining moments in the history of a nation and its literature. Quite often, however, these distinctions are the result of the periodizing impulse of literary historians rather than of authors themselves.There have, of course, been novel attempts to disturb the idea of a literary series marked by historical time lines. Denis Hollier’s (1998: xxv) monumental New History of French Literature is a notable attempt to think a literary history that is “no longer contained by national politics” and to shift focus from “the assertion of borders through literature and the presentation of a literature within borders” to “a questioning that results in the proliferation of those borders.” Hollier and his colleagues set out to proliferate the borders of French literature by organizing the emergence of texts around a series of events that seemed to complicate the teleology of national history and the assumption that there is a causal relationship between text and event. Still, the dates, events, and texts in this history take their Frenchness for granted; France and its history are the overdetermining categories. Thus the national repressed refuses to go away even in the pluralization—even pulverization—of its temporality.Yet, as Peter Kalliney notes in his introduction to this issue, we live in a time when both the idea and experience of the nation and the categories that inform it are challenged or in a state of flux. If the nation and literary history once held hands to establish boundaries, we now live in what appears, at least from an intellectual vantage point, to be the time of a world and literature without borders. Literary history now confronts the challenge of defining its object of study at a moment when “the cultural parameters of the nation, and of the capacities of literature to imagine them, are changing in contradictory ways, with a global economy that erodes national sovereignty and the electoral backlash of populist ethnonationalisms.” In this context, few scholars see their work as constrained by, or even connected to, either the problematic of the nation or the contested idea of periodizing. Indeed, many literary historians will bristle at the idea that their work, which is often comparative and transnational or is informed by methodologies that take their internationalism for granted, should be troubled by questions of periodicity or the geography of the nation. Why should a scholar working on, say, visuality in the long nineteenth century be bothered with national histories when neither of the keywords here refers to a nation, a period, or a time? This explains the implicit assumption in this issue that our task is to imagine a literary history outside the mandate and claims of the nation.On closer examination, however, the disclaimer of such categories might very well conceal the fact that they are just repressed and that in this repression they conceal the insidious hand of the imperium of national time. What may be presented as visuality might very well refer to very specific British or French debates on the scopic regime; the long nineteenth century might just be a code word for the reach of the British Empire before and after the reign of Queen Victoria; the invocation of a global century might not guarantee colonial subjects and events a central place in the making of literature. Often what appear to be universalizing gestures—say, the relationship between capitalism and world literature—end up solidifying the place that the culture of Europe, and more recently that of the United States, has come to occupy in literary history. Let us also not forget that at precisely that moment when the nation was supposed to have disappeared, an event that was dramatically represented by the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and that was supposed to be the end of history, or, more aptly, what Francis Fukuyama (1989: 3) calls “the exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism,” was also the beginning of the powerful and toxic return of nationalism in all regions of the world.So, perhaps the best way to push back against the national repressed is not to deny its existence but to undertake the task of returning it to consciousness, which seems to be one motivation for many of the essays collected in this issue, most notably those dealing with Russia and the former Soviet Union (see Bozovic and Clark in this issue). What these essays remind us is that when it comes to the emergence of literary-historical movements or concepts, there was never a clear-cut distinction between the national and the transnational or a complete break between the nation-state and the literary. Today, if the task of writing literary history after the nation appears complex, it is because even as we aspire to be transnational, our transnationalness is circumscribed by the institutions—including the passports we need to cross borders and the universities in which we work—which are national. Whether we agree or disagree with Pascale Casanova’s (1998: 34) claim that a literary heritage is “a matter of foremost national interest,” we cannot disregard the origins of literary history itself in national projects.This does not, of course, mean that literary history was invented by nationalists or political insiders to propagate a political project. On the contrary, the most compelling national histories were written by outsiders. The two examples that come to mind are François-René de Chateaubriand’s Essai sur la littérature anglaise (Essay on English Literature, 1836) and Hippolyte Adolphe Taine’s Histoire de la littérature anglaise (History of English Literature, 1872). That English literary history might have been invented by the French may appear ironic, but, in retrospect, it makes sense that it was only outsiders who could imagine a diverse group of writers, many of them divided by region and dialect, as belonging to a linguistic totality. French literary historians could imagine England as having a literature that expressed its national interests even before the English came up with such a conceptualization of their own literary projects. Chateaubriand (1836) and Taine (1900) were not trying to secure English literature for English nationalism. On the contrary, their goal was to develop a theory of French literature and French national culture that could be elaborated only in opposition to another national entity, the same tactic F. R. Leavis adopted when he tried to secure the superiority of English literature, in The Great Tradition, by comparing it to the French. To recruit Joseph Conrad into the pantheon of English literature in the face of “his foreignness,” Leavis (1973: 18) argued that Conrad chose to write in English rather than in French “for its distinctive qualities and because of the moral tradition associated with it.”The creation of a totality for the literature of others so that they can become comprehensible to us continues to haunt literary histories across the world. National literature may even be considered, for good or for bad, the precondition of both comparative and world literature. As Eric Hayot reminds us in his contribution to this issue, most cultural work today, including literary production, takes place within the nation. That Indian novels in English seem to celebrate cosmopolitanism may be heartening to global elites, but this should not make us oblivious to the fact that the works that have the most impact on common readers (and on viewers in the case of film) in India are in local languages and seem to be rooted in ecologies that are localized in terms of linguistic clusters. Our celebration of the global landscape can easily blind us to the existence and persistence of the localities that emerge “in a situation where the nation-state faces particular sorts of transnational destabilization” (Appadurai 1996: 178).There is another dimension to these debates: Is it possible to historicize literature outside the orbit of the nation, a category or structure that presents itself as the embodiment of history? To answer this question, it is perhaps useful to change the nature of the premise: instead of focusing on how literature needed the nation in order to have a history, we should ask why the nation, presumably already secure in its historicism and authority, needed literature in the first place. Here we should recall the lesson we learned from Benedict Anderson’s (1983: 204–5) Imagined Communities: nations were imagined communities that needed an imaginary institution in which wished-for yet unfulfilled desires could be expressed, and nations needed a literary language as a measure of their being and as a reassurance.In yet another ironic twist, the projects often proposed as alternatives to national literatures—comparative and world literature—seem to be made possible by the existence of nations as historical objects or artifacts. Three examples come to mind. The first is the well-known case of German Romanticism and its relation to the aesthetic state. Seeking a way out of the crisis of society and bourgeois identity, Romanticists would turn to an aesthetic state, or a literary absolute, as the site in which freedom could be imagined (see Chytry 1989: 70–105; and Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy 1988: 1–17). The second example can be found in the role of literature in the project of nation building in Latin America, where romance and nationalism went hand in hand. Here, Doris Sommer (1991: 30) reminds us, romances emerged to celebrate or predict “an identification of the Nation and State.” Literature came to function as an extension of a national project promoting patriotism and masculinist desire, of what Francine R. Masiello (1992: 11) aptly describes as gendered struggles in which women writers, without public authority, “insinuated doubt into the binary structures that inform official history.”The third example is the use of literature as the conduit for nationalism in the rise of the so-called postcolonial literatures of Africa. For most of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to cite one example, the project of African letters was subordinated to cultural nationalism. Indeed, here, as in Latin America, the road to nation building had to pass through the romance of writing. From Jomo Kenyatta and Julius Nyerere to Nelson Mandela, the patriarchal figures of African nationalism located literature at the center of their dreams and expectations of the future. At the same time, especially in the independence period, the institution of literature resisted its recruitment toward nationalist ends and, to quote Simon During (1990: 138), “operated in different social spaces than nationalism, employing different signifying practices.” Undoubtedly, literature enabled the coming into being of the postcolonial nation, but it was also the enemy of nationalism. In such situations, notes During, “to reject nationalism absolutely or to refuse to discriminate between nationalisms is to accede to a way of thought by which intellectuals—especially postcolonial intellectuals—cut themselves off from effective political action” (139). So, instead of scorning the nation and ceding it to the enemies of democracy, literary historians can move the conversation forward by confronting the doubleness of the literary project itself: desired by the nation and conscripted toward nationalist ends yet often adopted as the last line of defense against nationalism.A major contribution of these essays is their authors’ awareness that the question of literary history is ultimately about where we locate the emergence of the literary or the genres that we give precedence in the constellation of world literature. Looking at the rise of world literature from Moscow in the 1930s, Katerina Clark presents us with a history of literary movements that questions some basic assumptions about the literacy diffusion in general from the other side of the cultural wall that has historically divided East and West. Marijeta Bozovic adds to this history of Russian internationalism by exploring how a new contemporary avant-garde emerged in Russia in the post-Soviet era and how poetry has come to play an important role in forging new subjectivities and future collectivities. Poetry, as Harris Feinsod shows in his contribution, may well be the problem genre that marks both the possibility and the limits of literary history.Ultimately, the essays collected here return us to the problematic of time, a category that often promises an ontological or phenomenological status for literature, offering us the promise that the imaginative can be conceived as part of human experiences not imprisoned in the nation. Is it possible to see a temporality principle, that is, a concept of periodization, outside national history? In her contribution Susan Stanford Friedman calls attention to how literary history often involves competition over periodization, indicating the instability of the time frames that enable literary periods. Following on her earlier work (Friedman 2015), she reminds us that by privileging linear chronological time, periodization “can easily obscure the power relations embedded in space.” Friedman, who undertook the radical task of wrenching modernism away from European time in Planetary Modernisms, provides a compelling account of how literary periodization became entangled in a European chronology that seemed to survive new developments in theories of temporality in physics.At issue here, however, is whether the pluralization, rather than the outright rejection, of temporality can rescue literature from the narrow bounds of national time. What if the problematic under discussion—time and periodization—is embedded in the literary texts themselves and is hence not the result of critical choices? Or, to put the question differently, is there something about a literature that defines itself as modern or that locates itself within modernism that makes it insist on a European beginning and a specific periodization as its mode of operation? Is there a periodization and temporality that is a condition of possibility of what we call modernism, irrespective of where we think it begins and ends? Attempts to dislocate modernism from Euro-chronology, to expand its boundaries, its time scale, and its canon, seem to lead us, albeit surreptitiously, back to where we started—in the European city (London, Dublin, Paris, Prague) in a particular period (the 1890s to the 1920s).The reason for this is that time is a constitutive category in European modernism, and temporality seems to matter here more than in any other tradition. If we start talking about modernism in 1863 when Édouard Manet paints Olympia, 1910 when the world changes for Virginia Woolf, or 1922 when the ruptures brought about by World War I—the wasteland—become apparent, it is because these are the dates chosen by writers to inaugurate their movement; if we have located the beginning of modernism in the European city, it is because this is the essential setting in modernist texts; if we read the story of modernism as diffusionary, a voyage out, as it were, it is because this is how modernism structures its relationship to the world. Here we have an example of how a movement establishes the terms of its literary history and makes them immanent. Reading against this immanence, we should begin by recognizing the inscription of a certain European temporality in the modernist text and then explore how colonized elites sought to turn this time into their own time—the time of negritude, as it were. The paradox, of course, is that the temporal project of negritude, what Gary Wilder (2015: 7) calls “freedom time,” itself was driven by a desire, among colonized African and Caribbean intellectuals, to reclaim and refunction, rather than reject, “the categories and forms that mediated their subject.” Negritude thrived by making claims on the new theories of time circulating in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.There are perhaps, then, forms of periodicity that are part of the structure of literature and others that are quite arbitrary. Modernism and Romanticism belong to the first category: they see themselves as located within a moment in history that has decisively broken from its preceding period. These periods label themselves as such, and this intention is an important part of their history. On the opposite side of the spectrum are periods that are arbitrary, with beginnings and ends imposed by literary historians precisely to manage the diffuseness of the literary canon in a period of flux. There is no better illustration of the arbitrariness of literary history than the forums and divisions of the Modern Language Association. When the question of how to divide African literature came up during the last reorganization of forums, members of the division settled on dividing African literature between works published before 1990 and works published after. As far as I can tell (or recall), there was no compelling epistemological or ontological reason for selecting this date. The date was settled on quickly because the alternative—the further division of “sub-Saharan” Africa at the border of the Limpopo River—would (once again) privilege white South African writing. Increasingly, however, this arbitrary date, 1990, is being incorporated into African literary history as if it had an innate cultural or literary value or meaning. This issue of MLQ reminds us that periods, like nations, are constructs, convenient markers, with no historical or epistemological justification, yet they claim the authority of a concept. Combined, the essays collected here remind us of the necessity of literary history and the trouble it causes.