World-systems analyses emerged in the 1970s as attempts to fuse a Marxist-informed critique of developmental economics with historical sociology. They are best known through the writings of Immanuel Wallerstein (1930-2019), but benefit from multiple others who have contributed to and expanded the topics of interest for the world-systems knowledge movement. This chapter highlights some of the main concerns of world-systems and illustrates their relevance for literary and cultural studies of economics, society, the State, and cultural production. World-systems analyses began as alternatives to forms of developmental and stage theories, both Keynesian-oriented economics in the post-war period, and within post-Russian Revolution Marxism. As a moral protest against the capitalist world-system, world-systems analyses also question the theoretical and epistemological frameworks developed within the modern research university.

Realism has occupied an ambivalent place in the career of the novel through the twentieth century. After its heyday in the nineteenth century, realism was abandoned by many literary movements—most famously Anglo-American modernism and Latin-American magical realism. This chapter argues that realism has made a comeback in contemporary times through a postcolonial allegorical appropriation of the novel where realism functions to critique literal and epistemic violence and project alternative worlds. Contemporary world realism arises from a nexus of ethical, epistemological and aesthetic concerns that position the novel as a space for reasoned reflection on the traumatic emergence of the contemporary world system. The chapter explores the implicit historicism of world realist aesthetics and novelists’ engagement with conflicts about historical process, world-systems, and temporality shaping debates in world literature today.