The essays in this volume focus on new approaches to how literature reflects and creates 'world', and thus to the issues of "literature 'and' world" and "literature 'as' world". They discuss questions of the implied worldview of literary texts on the one hand, and the way literature may create 'world' through self-referentiality and the establishing of intermedial relations with other arts on the other. In the latter cases, works will foreground their own fictionality and/or mediality, and their status as artefacts and as the products of a poietic act of creation. Illustrating the potential of new approaches and developments for describing the nature of the worlds devised in fictional texts,