How does literature represent, challenge and help us understand our experience of globalization? Taking literary globalization studies beyond its traditional political focus, Literature and the Experience of Globalization explores how writers from Shakespeare through Goethe to Isak Dinesen, J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh and Bruce Chatwin engage with the human dimensions of globalization. Through a wide range of insightful close readings, Svend Erik Larsen brings contemporary world literature approaches to bear on cross-cultural experiences of migration and travel, translation, memory, history and embodied knowledge. In doing so, this important intervention demonstrates how literature becomes an essential site for understanding the ways in which globalization has become an integral part of everyday experience. Which questions can we ask to past literature from the view-point of our historical consciousness and the criss-crossing of literatures and media? How can we read literature today and relate as readers with the innumerable texts that, in the last decades, have been dealing with problems of personal or collective identity, migrations, exiles, the intermingling of languages or the discrepancies between mother tongue and adopted speech? Challenging any simple economic, political, cultural and literary determinism, Larsen forcefully claims that fiction is an indispensable tool to think the conditions we live in, not as perfect description or explanation, but as a dynamic account of the experience of human life in a present that is already hinting at our future.