托馬斯·奧利弗·比比是美國賓州州立大學比較文學教授、《比較文學研究》雜志主編,主要從事文學批評與理論、18世紀文學、翻譯理論與實踐、法律與文學等領域的研究,著有《歐洲大陸上的科拉麗莎》(1991)、《文類的意識形態性》(1994)、《歐洲書信體小說》(1999)、《現代歐美小說中的民族與地域》(2008)、《德國法律與文學的合與離》(2011)等。受《外國文學研究》編輯部委托,尚必武博士利用在美國國家人文中心從事學術研究的便利,對比比教授進行了專訪,談話主要涉及世界文學的定義、民族文學與世界文學之間的關系、世界文學的閱讀與教學,以及翻譯與世界文學等一系列重要論題。現將全部訪談內容整理刊出,以就教于讀者。

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.