This chapter uses the South Slav context to compare how representatives of dominant and subordinate literary cultures attempt to characterize and narrate the history of smaller national literatures. It begins from a notion of exchange whereby dominant literary nations are traditionally perceived to export stylistic features for emulation by writers in subordinate literatures and systems of periodization and classification for adoption by those literatures’ historians. In return, these subordinate literatures gain a channel of communication through which some degree of recognition or cultural legitimacy may be bestowed. The chapter addresses efforts by the academic community of dominant cultural systems to move beyond national models of literary history, focusing on accounts by Linda Hutcheon, Stephen Greenblatt, Pascale Casanova and David Damrosch that use South Slav examples to make their case. These accounts are set against the earlier endeavours of Serbian literary historians – Jovan Skerlić, Pavle Popović and Svetozar Petrović – who engage with similar questions in their complex local context. The chapter argues that this attempt to eradicate a political agenda identified in the national approach to literary history in fact reinforces the hegemony of the dominant over the subordinate.