Goethe believed his idea of “Weltliteratur” and the medium of literary reviews in literary magazines to be closely connected. While “Weltliteratur” as such has been widely explored to date and has become a far-reaching research paradigm over recent decades, the medium itself – that is to say reviews – has not received the same amount of attention. The Villa Vigoni Talk on Die Rezension als Medium der Weltliteratur / Le recensioni come strumento della “Weltliteratur" / Reviews as an Instrument of "Weltliteratur" (Villa Vigoni, 22-24 October 2018) aims to explore the issue of literary reviews in eighteenth and nineteenth-century European literary magazines, focusing on the perspectives this genre opened up to literature and its global network.