Rabindranath Tagore: the First Figure of a Literary History that is Truly Worldly?

Drawing on the work of Rabindranath Tagore, this article identifies the conditions of a literary history that would be truly worldly. The idea is not to establish an anthology of universal literature (defined according to the literary value of its texts), nor to assess or quantify the flows of global literature (defined according to its diffusion), but to identify a literature produced by cross-fertilizations that exceed national idiosyncrasies : what the author identifies as cosmopolitan literature.