Literature and the Making of the World
Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices
Professor or Dr Stefan Helgesson editor Professor or Dr Helena Bodin editor Professor or Dr Annika Mörte Alling editor
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Published:29th Jun '23
£28.99
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Examines how localized literary practices around the world engage with globalized predicaments, using a collection of in-depth studies ranging from the 19th century until today.
This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of ‘world’ and ‘globe’ concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One – ‘Worlds in Texts’ – to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two – ‘Texts in Worlds’ – the concerns of these nine chapters range from multilingualism, genre and style to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice – which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa and India – contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
A tour de force in world literature studies. A brilliant, wide-ranging and deeply reflective account that opens up new vistas of theory and critical practice on the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics in world literature. * Debjani Ganguly, Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA, and Editor of The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021) *
This volume offers a fascinating insight into the interplay between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular in a wide-ranging group of examples from different cultures and periods. The series introduction provides an incisive overview of how this approach to literary studies relates to other theories of world literature, setting out its difference from theories of systems and circulation, as well as from other relational pairs, such as the centre and periphery or the global and local. The emphasis in this particular volume is on how the polysemic concept of the world embraces the linguistic, the anthropological and the cultural, among others; literature contributes to making these worlds on overlapping intratextual and extratextual levels. The nine essays collected here explore the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic through a mixture of close reading and cultural analysis, always sensitive to context, nuance and plurality. Literature and the Making of the World is warmly recommended not just to readers interested in the debates surrounding world literature, or to readers interested in the specific case studies, but also to those who are interested in how literature contributes to the ways that we create and make sense of the world around us. * Richard Hibbitt, Co-Director of the Centre for World Literatures, University of Leeds, UK *
World literature in this collection is less a stable system and more a dynamic set of constellations, constantly made, unmade and remade. Cosmopolitan and vernacular become unfixed and take on many guises in this theoretically and empirically rich and exciting collection. * Francesca Orsini, Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literatures, SOAS, University of London, UK *
ISBN: 9781501374197
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
350 pages