Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain?

With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

Jeffrey R. Di Leo is Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria, USA. He is Editor of the American Book Review, Founding Editor of the journal symploke, and Executive Director of the Society for Critical Exchange and its Winter Theory Institute. His recent publications includeThe End of American Literature: Essays from the Late Age of Print (2019), The Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019), What's Wrong with Antitheory? (Bloomsbury, 2020), Vinyl Theory (2020), Happiness (2022), and Contemporary Literary and Cultural Theory: An Overview (Bloomsbury, 2023).

Christian Moraru is Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro, USA. His recent publications include Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (2011), Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015), Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Flat Aesthetics: Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary (Bloomsbury, 2023).