Although there is no precise date on which the spatial turn in the humanities could be said to have occurred, a combination of forces and events over the past few decades has ensured that spatiality has become a key concept, and as a consequence, this has effectively transformed many approaches to literary and cultural texts. Geocriticism and spatial literary studies, among others, have focused attention on matters of space, place, and mapping. More generally, critics inspired by such practices have made important connections between literature and geography, architecture, urban planning, and environmental studies, along with other spatially oriented arts and sciences. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has been occasioned by a number of factors, practical and theoretical, but perhaps the most urgent are those associated with the processes and ramifications of globalization. With the advent of globalization, here understood mainly as the extension and expansion of the capitalist mode of production across national boundaries and to a worldwide scale, many of the previously settled social and spatial arrangements—including such formerly crucial distinctions as core and periphery, urban and rural, domestic and foreign, or even near and far, to name a few—have been unsettled and subject to revisionary thinking. In Fredric Jameson’s revolutionary formulation, postmodernism itself emerged as the cultural logic of late capitalism, which is also to say that postmodernity may be associated with the age of globalization, and postmodern thought in its various respects a response to the radically transformed social, political, economic, and cultural terrain of this epoch. As Edward Soja has made clear in such works as Postmodern Geographies and Thirdspace, the postmodern era and postmodernism are both characterized by a new spatiality and a renewed emphasis in critical social theory on space, place, and mapping.

During roughly the same period, world literature has gone from a minor concept, little discussed even in academic criticism and theory, to a major force within both academic literary studies and the wider realms of literary journalism, not to mention the sudden prominence of the concept for anthologists, booksellers, prize committees, and consumers in general.