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This remarkably broad and informative book offers an introduction to and overview of World Literature. Tracing the term from its earliest roots and situating it within a number of relevant contexts from postcolonialism to postmodernism, this book is the ideal guide to an increasingly popular and important term in literary studies. It is accessible and engaging and will be invaluable to students of world literature, comparative literature, translation and postcolonial studies and anyone with an interest in these or related topics.
World Literature is an increasingly influential subject in literary studies, which has led to the re-framing of contemporary ideas of ‘national literatures’, language and translation. World Literature: A Reader brings together thirty essential readings which display the theoretical foundations of the subject, as well as showing its conceptual development over a two hundred year period. The book features: an illuminating introduction to the subject, with suggested reading paths to help readers navigate through the materials texts exploring key themes such as globalization, cosmopolitanism, post/trans-nationalism, and translation and nationalism writings by major figures including J. W. Goethe, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Longxi Zhao, David Damrosch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova and Milan Kundera. The early explorations of the meaning of ‘Weltliteratur’ are introduced, while twenty-first century interpretations by leading scholars today show the latest critical developments in the field. The editors offer readers the ideal introduction to the theories and debates surrounding the impact of this crucial area on the modern literary landscape.
In the age of globalization, the category of "World Literature" is increasingly important to academic teaching and research. The Routledge Companion to World Literature offers a comprehensive pathway into this burgeoning and popular field. Separated into four key sections, the volume covers: the history of World Literature through significant writers and theorists from Goethe to Said, Casanova and Moretti the disciplinary relationship of World Literature to areas such as philology, translation, globalization and diaspora studies theoretical issues in World Literature including gender, politics and ethics a global perspective on the politics of World Literature. The forty-eight outstanding contributors to this companion offer an ideal introduction to those approaching the field for the first time, or looking to further their knowledge of this extensive field.
This work is a critical evaluation of the concepts of convention and innovation as applied in the study of changing literary values, hierarchies and canons. Two approaches are analyzed: (1) the linking of convention and the subject's awareness of convention, and (2) systems theory. The merits of both approaches are discussed and an attempt is made to combine them and to regard systems of literary communication primarily as systems of conventions. Specific cases of changing conventions and innovation are illustrated with examples from the field of versification (Rimbaud), reception studies (Puskin, Goethe, George Eliot), the dichotomy of forgetting/remembering (Nietzsche, Proust), avant-garde, the American dream, and popular genres assimilated in Postmodernism.
Text to Reader seeks to find a critical approach that links a novel's form to its socio-cultural context. Combining elements from Iser's reception aesthetics, speech act theory, and Goffman's frame analysis, this book starts from the assumption that a reader has certain conventional expectations with regard to a novel, and then goes on to examine how violations of these expectations rule the reader's relationship to the novel. The theory sketched in the first chapter is then, in four subsequent chapters, applied to The French Lieutenant's Woman by the English author John Fowles, Letters by the American John Barth, Libro de Manuel by the Argentinean Julio Cortázar, and De Kapellekensbaan by the Flemish novelist Louis-Paul Boon. The particular form each of these novels takes is analyzed as correlative to that novel's communicative function. This book will be of interest to comparatists, students of English and American literature, and the literatures of Latin-America and the Low Countries.
Goethe in 1827 famously claimed that national literatures did not mean very much anymore, and that the epoch of world literature was at hand. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, in the so-called "transnational turn" in literary studies, interest in world literature, and in how texts move beyond national or linguistic boundaries, has peaked. The authors of the 18 articles making up Literary Transnationalism(s) reflect on how literary texts move between cultures via translation, adaptation, and intertextual referencing, thus entering the field of world literature. The texts and subjects treated range from Caribbean, American, and Latin American literature to European migrant literature...
If you want to know how globalisation affects literary studies today this is the book for you. Why has world literature become so hotly debated? How does it affect the study of national literatures? What does geopolitics have to do with literature? Does American academe still set an example for the rest of the world? Is China taking over? What about European literature? Europe’s literatures? Do “minor” European literatures get lost in the shuffle? How can authors from such literatures get noticed? Who gains and who loses in an age of world literature? If those are questions that bewilder you look no further: this book provides answers and leaves you fully equipped to dig deeper into the fascinating world of world literature in an age of geopolitics.
The Canonical Debate Today. Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries re-enacts the canonical issues current in the ’90s from a new perspective, triggered by the changes that occurred worldwide in understanding the concepts and the status of theory, in the legacy of literary studies within the field of humanities, and in cultural production and reception. During the last decade discussions of globalization mostly took into account its impact on the status of academic disciplines such as comparative literature or cultural studies, or the reconfiguration of national literary fields. These debates do not dispense with canonicity altogether but make it more urgent and necessary. Canons see...
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