Ever since Erasmus, the republic of letters – the community of educated men and women of all nations – has been a hopeful, idealistic notion. It derives its glamour, and its authority, from its claim to be a different kind of commonwealth than ordinary states and empires. Medicis, Bourbons, and Habsburgs might lay waste to Europe, but the potentates of the republic of letters – Erasmus and More, Diderot and Adam Smith, Carlyle and Emerson – remained loftily collegial. The liberal minds of all nations owed a greater allegiance to one another, and to the ideal of free inquiry, than to any worldly potentate. This notion may have been a fiction, but it exerted an actual force: in dreaming of a republic of letters, the writers and readers of four centuries helped to bring it partially into being. Thomas Jefferson, who helped found the American republic, nevertheless proclaimed that “No republic is more real than that of letters.”

But what if the republic of letters should turn out to be all too real – so real, in fact, that it is prey to all the same strife and selfishness as any actual polity? That is the provocative argument of Pascal Casanova’s “The World Republic of Letters” (Harvard University Press, 402 pages, $35), first published in France in 1999 and now translated into English. “The world of letters,” he insists, “is in fact something quite different from the received view of literature as a peaceful domain. Its history is one of incessant competition over the very nature of literature itself.”

Mr. Casanova sketches the history of this “competition” in three major stages. In the 16th century, the first European vernaculars asserted their parity with Latin and Greek, thus creating what Casanova calls an “international literary space” for the first time. He dwells mainly on the French experience, pointing to Joachim du Bellay’s 1549 tract “The Defense and Illustration of the French Language” as the key founding event, but similar proclamations were made in England at the same time, and in Italy as early as the 14th century.

For the next 250 years, these three tongues, along with Spanish, dominated the republic of letters, with French in particular becoming the eponymous “lingua franca” from Berlin to Petersburg. It wasn’t until the late 18th century that Herder staked a claim for German, and by extension other European tongues, to be considered equally valid, the unique expressions of national character. And it wasn’t until after World War II that postcolonial movements around the world insisted that the former dependencies of Europe be treated as literary equals.

Today, at long last, international literary space encompasses practically the whole literate world. That is, a writer in any nation or language is at least potentially aware of what the writers of any other nation or language are doing. Thanks to a complex infrastructure of editors and agents, publishers and distributors, critics and booksellers, a reader in New York can read Haruki Murakami or Pramoedya Ananta Toer as easily as they can John Updike. By the same token, a writer in Algeria can be influenced by Faulkner – like Rachid Boudjedra, who claimed that Faulkner’s “world is the same world as my own, the world in which I was born.”

Yet Mr. Casanova insists that each party in this cross-cultural exchange is hindered as well as helped by it. The reader in the metropolis – New York, London, or, in this Gallocentric book, supremely Paris – can only approach work from the “provinces” through familiar categories of perception and judgment; its novelty is neutered, and sometimes completely misunderstood. Mr. Casanova’s favorite example is Kafka, whom he reads – controversially, and doubtfully – as a Jewish nationalist writer, whom the mandarins of the West insisted on viewing as a deracinated existentialist.

On the other hand, the writer in the global provinces must undergo a series of ordeals if he is to claim a place in the “international literary space” – that is, in the esteem of European and American readers. Should he write in his native language, which may be spoken by only a few million people, or in English or French, which is often the tongue of his former colonial oppressor? Should he attempt to master the most advanced techniques of the most advanced literatures, and thereby lose the interest of his own compatriots, or write according to the folk or realist conventions his local audience expects, and thereby lose the esteem of readers living on what Mr. Casanova calls “literary Greenwich time”?

Mr. Casanova surveys a range of possible solutions to this dilemma. At one extreme is V.S. Naipaul, who vocally rejected his native Trinidad and remade himself as an English writer – while retaining, to an extent Mr. Casanova hostilely refuses to acknowledge, an ironic awareness of the impossibility of that transformation. At the other end of the spectrum is the Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who first published novels in English under the name James T. Ngugi, before deciding to write only in Kikuyu – a language with almost no written tradition.

Somewhere in the middle is James Joyce, who used a “foreign” language, English, in a way that neither the English or the Irish could readily accept. For Mr. Casanova, the Joycean route is obviously the preferred one.

The most questionable of the author’s many unexamined assumptions is that formal experimentation is the one true way for literature to progress. He has an almost ludicrous hostility to writers he calls “national” – as though to be indifferent to international fame is automatically to be philistine, reactionary, and a bad writer. On the other hand, he complacently accepts what is by now a wornout Modernist notion of literary autonomy, so that Beckett’s self-referential fidgets become the telos toward which world literature has been striving.

Such critical assumptions betray what might be called the provincialism of the metropolis – above all of Paris, whose literary authority Mr. Casanova celebrates in nearly triumphalist terms. Strikingly, his model of “international literary space” has almost nothing to say about American literature, and literally nothing at all to say about Russian, not to mention Chinese or Japanese – a sign that his definition of “international” is clandestinely Eurocentric, a relic of the arrogance of the former imperialist powers.

Yet even after all these reservations, Mr. Casanova remains a fruitful and ingenious thinker, the kind of critic one is happy to read – and even happier to argue with.