Abstract: Thomas Oliver Beebee is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature at Penn State University, editor-in-chief of the journal Comparative Literature Studies, and general editor of the Bloomsbury series, Literatures as World Literature. The author of Clarissa on the Continent (1991), The Ideology Of Genre (1994), Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999), Nation and Region in Modern European and American Fiction (2008),and Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (2011), Beebeeengages in a numberof research areas, including criticism and theory, epistolarity, eighteenth-century literature, translation (theory, practice, and literary mimesis), mental maps in literature, and law and literature. On behalf of Foreign Literature Studies, Dr. Shang Biwu, when working as a fellow of the National Humanities Center (2015-2016), interviewed Professor Beebee on a wide range of issues concerning world literature and comparative literature, such as the definition of world literature, the reading and teaching of world literature, national literature and world literature, and translation and world literature.

Key words: world literature, comparative literature, national literature, translation