The Cambridge History of World Literature

This History explores the function of literary studies in our globalized era, offering insights into transregional literary exchanges.

Debjani Ganguly (Edited by)

9781108557269, Cambridge University Press

Multiple-component retail product, published 9 September 2021

1400 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 6.5 cm, 1.74 kg

'This focused scholarly text is an excellent addition to the literature on comparative and world literature … Highly recommended.' M. Oh, Choice

World Literature is a vital part of twentieth-first century critical and comparative literary studies. As a field that engages seriously with function of literary studies in our global era, the study of World literature requires new approaches. The Cambridge History of World Literature is founded on the assumption that World Literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. It highlights scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, these volumes will offer insights into new cartographies – the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multilingual local – that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will interrogate existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

Volume I. Introduction
Part I. Genealogies: 1. Ancient world literature
2. The silk roads of world literature
3. Arabic literary prose, adab literature, and the formation of islamicate imperial culture
4. World making and early modernity: cartographic poesis in Europe and South Asia
5. Colonial philology and the origins of world literature
6. Globalism's pre-history: technologies of modernism
7. After 1945: Holocaust memory, postcoloniality and world history
8. World literature after 1989: revolutions in motion
Part II. Thinking the World: 9. Does poetry make worlds?
10. Ecosystems of world literature
11. From world literature to world philosophy and back again
12. Saving Europe through Weltliteratur: Victor Klemperer
13. Vi?vas?hitya: Rabindranath Tagore's idea of world literature
Part III. Transregional Worlding: 14. East Asia as comparative paradigm
15. Latin American baroque: or error by design
16. Comparative world literature and worlds in Portuguese
17. Africa and world literature
18. Literary revolution: Ireland and the world
19. Korean Worlds and echoes of the cold war
20. French colonial literature in Indochina: colonial adventure and continental drift
21. From diasporic Tamil literature to global Tamil literature
Part IV. Cartographic Shifts: 22. The multilingual local: worlding literature in India
23. Oceanic comparativism and world literature
24. Mediterranean worlds in the long nineteenth century
25. Antipodal turns: Antipodean Americas and the hemispheric shift
26. The region as an in-between space: Tomas Tranströmer's östersjöar and the making of an archipelagic Nordic literature
Volume II: Part V. World Literature and Translation: 27. Translating iconoclasm: Sino-Muslim Azharites and south-south translations
28. The avant-garde journal between Maghreb and Levant
29. The 'forgers' of world literature: translation, Nachdichtung and Hebrew world poetry
30. World literature as process and relation: East Asia's Russia and translation
Part VI. Poetics, genre, intermediality: 31. Poetry, (Un) translatability, and world literature
32. The reinvention of the novel in Africa
33. The return of realism in the world novel
34. The graphic novel as an intermedial form
35. World children's literature
Part VII. Scales, Polysystems, Canons: 36. Spatial scale and the urban everyday: the physiology as a travelling genre (Paris, St. Petersburg, Tiflis)
37. Imaginative geographies in the medieval Islamic republic of letters
38. The anthology as the canon of world literature
39. Data worlds: patterns, structures, libraries
Part VIII. Modes of Reading and Circulation: 40. Transregional critique and the challenge of comparison: between Latin America and China
41. Reading world literature through the postcolonial and diasporic lens
42. The Indian republic, reading publics and world literary catalogs
43. The culture industry and the making of world literature
Part IX. The Worldly and the Planetary: 44. Asylum papers
45. Guantaìnamo diary as world(ly) testimony
46. The non-human, the posthuman and the universal
47. World literature as planetary literature.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA], Literature: history & criticism [DS]