After being in disrepute for almost half a century, the term “world literature” enjoyed a spectacular revival around the turn of the millennium. A fair number of scholars contributed to this turnaround—the shorthand reason for which was accelerated globalization—but mainly three tend to be mentioned: David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova. Indeed, so frequently are they invoked that an unsuspecting observer (at least in North America) would be forgiven for assuming that they defined the parameters of the debate once and for all.In this slightly tired state of affairs, Alexander Beecroft's An Ecology of World Literature is a refreshing and impressively thorough attempt at not just fine-tuning but reconceptualizing world literature studies. Also, Beecroft is not producing yet another polemic (a common way to establish authority in the field), but presents his arguments in an open and collaborative spirit. The conversation that his book participates in revolves instead around a handful of deceptively simple yet fundamental questions: What is a language? What is literature? What is a literature? Taken together, Beecroft's responses constitute a significant step forward in scholarship. His book should be read in conjunction with other contributions to the world literature debate by, say, Ottmar Ette, Emily Apter, Gayatri Spivak, Jerôme David, Aamir Mufti, Theo D'haen, Zhang Longxi, César Dominguez, Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Rebecca Walkowitz, Francesca Orsini, and Elke Sturm-Trigonakis, but the methodological and theoretical scope of An Ecology of World Literature is such that it provides a framework through which much of the field as a whole can be appraised.Two premises of Beecroft's argument are worth highlighting. One is the deliberately “etic” rather than “emic” approach, which means that his categories are applied to the material “from the outside,” rather than being derived from within the (or a) tradition or culture itself. This is potentially controversial, for two very different reasons. On the one hand, untranslatable cultural phenomena risk elision when alien categories do their work. On the other, the supposedly etic could serve to mask ideologically what are emic Western categories—the very word “literature” being foremost among these. Beecroft is aware of both of these risks, but counters by underscoring the commitment to comparativism: the critical language that enables comparative study “must be etic to at least one of the cultures under study, if it is not etic to both, or all, of them” (30). The etic approach is in other words a condition of knowledge, for better or worse. More importantly, however, a refusal to make the etic leap would risk reducing comparative literature to what it once used to be: an investigation of the organic and contiguous relationships within Western literature and little besides. Better then to devise an artificial set of concepts that aims at defamiliarizing all verbal art (to use one of these concepts), both past and present.The second premise is that Beecroft focuses on literary reception and circulation, rather than production or close textual analysis. This is standard procedure in world literature studies—and I would in fact claim that more attention needs to be paid to authorship—but Beecroft's contribution is to distinguish between the many possible modes of circulation and their formative impact on literature. Not only can one and the same text at different times be received as either “vernacular” or “cosmopolitan,” but the dominant and legitimate form of circulation in a given context will in turn shape what is written (which could be read as a development of Jauss's reception aesthetics, surprisingly ignored by Beecroft).As these initial remarks show, Beecroft's study is very much a scholar's book on literature, written for other scholars. This is precisely what makes it so useful, other limitations notwithstanding. Rather than directly entering the game of prestige and vying for the merits of, for example, one form of the novel over the other, An Ecology of World Literature steps back and allows us to reflect on the many different types of literary values that have evolved across the world and through deep time. This is world literature with a difference, focusing not on a collection of masterpieces or exotic windows on the world, nor on an all-or-nothing competition for recognition in “the” centre of the literary world, but rather on devising a more credible metalanguage for world literary study.Moving away from the economic metaphors of trade and capital established mainly by Casanova (pace Bourdieu and Valéry), Beecroft's ecological heuristic is not just a metaphor, but also grounded in a consistent concern with “the interaction of literature with its environment” (3). In this way, his book provides an intriguing combination of idiographic historiography and typological conclusions. Beecroft's claims are always evidence based—drawing mainly on Chinese, Greek, Latin, and European sources—but his intention is to describe literary “biomes” (which can be found wherever prevailing conditions allow) rather than “ecozones” (which are geographically specific). Importantly, this is not presented as a teleological model; various ecologies may coexist and gain different relative strengths in different periods. Whether or not it is a properly historical model is however open to debate, as I will discuss toward the end.Beecroft's account boils down in this way to a list of six ideal-typical literary biomes. The first he calls “epichoric literature,” a “limit case” for literary circulation. This remains restricted to a “single, small-scale, political and/or cultural context” (37) and is arguably the oldest literary ecology, epitomized by oral delivery in a small community. By contrast, the maximized version of circulation is “global literature,” an ecology still in the process of being formed. Between these two extremes, we find “panchoric,” cosmopolitan, vernacular and national ecologies.This selection of headings is somewhat counterintuitive. At the very core of Beecroft's argument, we find an engagement with Sheldon Pollock's theorization of cosmopolitan and vernacular literature along a South Asian–European comparative axis. This is a highly productive starting point, given not least Pollock's brilliant counter-Herderian insight that cosmopolitan literature has historical priority over vernacularization, but Beecroft's six ecologies demonstrate that the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic is far from the only game in town—or, rather, that our conception of the cosmopolitan and the vernacular needs to be refined. National literature, which remains the default mode of organizing literary studies, may draw on the vernacular but is dependent on the nation-state, which was emphatically not the case with the vernacular interventions of Dante or the Korean monk Kyunyǒ in the tenth century CE. Similarly, what Beecroft terms the panchoric—exemplified by the literatures of Ancient Greece and pre-Qin China—bears comparison with cosmopolitan literature, but whereas cosmopolitan languages such as Latin, Sanskrit, or Arabic were adopted by elites in diverse linguistic environments, panchoric literature is characterized by uniting smaller polities through a common language, a canonized set of texts (such as the Canon of Songs), and a mythology (such as the Trojan war) that enables the construction of a shared cultural identity.We begin to see here how Beecroft's model is shaped by taking a handful of variables into account. The most important of these are language, script, literary form, religion, economic resources, technologies of reproduction and circulation, and political organization. In any given ecology, these variables are subject to different constraints. Orality, unless technologically mediated, is constrained by the reach of the human voice and the reliability of memory. Vernacular literature is constrained by the reach of its language, but has the potential to penetrate much deeper into that particular speech community. Literature in a cosmopolitan language, by contrast, can reach widely but thinly. Written literature is by definition constrained not just by language but by the reach of literacy within that particular script. The circulation of printed books is constrained by the buying power of the readership—or the relative spread of public libraries. And literary recognition, that greatest prize of all, is inevitably limited by the available amount of attention as well as political interests.It is in the political dimension of literary reception, moreover, where constraints are most flexible and subject to external pressure. In one of his many sharp observations, Beecroft states that “[o]ne of the chief tasks for each ecology as it emerges is to reduce the quantity of information within the system; some existing texts cannot survive in the new environment, others survive in a marginal or altered role, while others still flourish in their new and unexpected surroundings” (198). In national ecologies, for example, cosmopolitan sources are obscured—Milton's Latin writings fall by the wayside—and the vernacular canon is streamlined to fit the narrative of national emergence. As English literature today transforms into Global English literature, the national dimension of English must, by contrast, be suppressed. Literatures (in the plural, as identifiable groupings of texts) are in other words produced to no small degree through politically inflected information management—an observation that boomerangs back at those of us whose bread and butter it is to teach and write about literature.An Ecology of World Literature seems destined to become a classic within world literature studies, thanks both to its conceptual inventiveness, and by virtue of including the full range of literary cultures in its purview, from the exceptionally small Sentinelese language on the Andaman islands to Stieg Larsson's global blockbusters. This does not of course mean that it settles, once and for all, the problems and disagreements pervading world literature. By taking the study of literature as a self-evident task, it does not address that bigger and troubling question of literature's continued relevance (or lack thereof) in our digital age. Nor does Beecroft—the breathtaking scope of his learning notwithstanding—manage fully to interrogate his disciplinary positioning in a distinctly North American tradition of comparative literature. His failure to note some very national and vernacular aspects of Stieg Larsson's thrillers (I speak here as a Swede) may be forgiven, but it is unfortunate that he reproduces the characteristic marginalization of African literature in the field. Mentioned only in passing, and mostly under the postcolonial rubric, the African continent presents not only some of the most striking combinations of literary ecologies in the world today, but poses also—together with Caribbean literature—an interesting challenge to Beecroft's model. Do novels such as Wole Soyinka's Aké, Ngugi wa Thiongo's The Wizard of the Crow or Léonora Miano's La saison de l'ombre, to take some very concrete examples, belong to an epichoric, panchoric, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national, or global ecology? Remaining mindful of the fact that such ecologies indicate practices of reading and interpretation, it could be argued that they belong in several ecologies at once. But this still does not address the peculiarities of diasporic, postcolonial, and—most controversially—racialized modes of reading, which perhaps tells us something of the limitations of Beecroft's approach.Typologies are seductive and risk leading to a pointless proliferation of epicycles, so I am not necessarily advocating the introduction of yet another ecology. Indeed, it is by substantiating each ecology with a wealth of empirical material (if slightly less so in the epichoric and global chapters) that Beecroft keeps the spectre of sheer typological abstraction at bay. But his etic biomes approach means also that a more rigorous historicist perspective is sacrificed. As the African case shows, it is only by way of historical critique that the anomalous positioning of African literature—exemplified also by Beecroft's sidelining of it—can be accounted for. In other words, instead of using historical material to substantiate the typology, the next step after Beecroft might be a dialectical reversal: to use the typology in the service of an understanding of how literature is constantly transformed by history, as well as to interrogate the conditions of possibility that enable “world literature” as a project, to begin with. African literature forces us, among other things, to confront the implications of privileging writing and print over orality, as well as the juxtaposition of the internationally most visible and powerful languages (English and French) with some of the least visible and vulnerable (most African languages). Beecroft's ecologies can provide a vocabulary to describe this situation, but it requires historical grounding in order to be understood.