This book examines how Octavio Paz and Giorgos Seferis, two major poet-critics positioned at the margins of Western modernity, articulate alternative epistemologies that contest dominant models of modernity and World Literature. Addressing the problem of Eurocentric universals in Comparative Literature, the study proposes a decolonial and philologically grounded framework to reconceive how modernity, tradition, and poetic form, as articulated from marginal locations, enable a different comparative methodology.

Through close readings of their critical essays and poetic works, it demonstrates how both authors engage with metropolitan canons while generating concepts that transcend national literatures and disrupt the cultural hierarchies of the global literary system. The book provides scholars of comparative literature, world literature, and Modern Greek and Latin American studies with new methodological tools for understanding how marginal modernities redefine the possibilities of comparison today.