Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-18T12:44:09.595Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 August 2021

By
Debjani Ganguly
Edited by
Debjani Ganguly
Debjani Ganguly
Affiliation:
University of Virginia
Get access

Summary

World literature dwells in our time and in times past. As a treasured heritage of artistic expression in oral, visual, and written forms, it is an indelible part of the story of evolution of human civilization. As a scholarly field, however, world literature has had a rather sporadic presence in the disciplinary landscape of modern universities, surging and receding in accordance with political and sociocultural transformations. The contemporary era is witnessing one such resurgence. The term world appears to have made a spectacular reentry as a literary critical rubric in the twenty-first century. One hears of the “world” all too frequently in academic circles, and in ways that mark our current global conjuncture as, perhaps, the most apposite moment for its articulation. One is reminded of Walter Benjamin’s phrase “the now of knowability” when certain historical periods offer just the right temporal traction for an idea to gain rhetorical currency.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of World Literature , pp. 1 - 46
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ahmed, Siraj. 2013. “Notes from Babel: Toward a Colonial History of Comparative Literature.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 39, No. 2: 296–326.Google Scholar
Ahmed, Siraj. 2017. Archaeology of Babel: The Colonial Foundation of the Humanities. Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Alam, Muzaffar, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2007. Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discovery: 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press,Google Scholar
Allan, Michael. 2016. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Apter, Emily. 2006. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Apter, Emily. 2014. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability.Verso.Google Scholar
Arac, Jonathan. 2002. “Anglo-Globalism?” New Left Review, Vol. 16 (July–August): 35–45.Google Scholar
Auerbach, Eric. 1969. “Philology and Weltliteratur.” Trans. E. Said and M. Said. Centennial Review, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter): 1–17.Google Scholar
Bassnett, Susan. 2014. “From Cultural Turn to Translational Turn.” In World Literature in Theory, ed. Damrosch, David. Wiley Blackwell, 234–45.Google Scholar
Beecroft, Alexander. 2008. “World Literature Without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems.” New Left Review, Vol. 54 (November): 87–100.Google Scholar
Beecroft, Alexander. 2015. An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Verso.Google Scholar
Bhattacharya, Baidik. 2019. Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature. Routledge.Google Scholar
Brooker, Peter, Gasiorek, Andrzej, Longworth, Deborah, and Thacker, Andrew, eds. 2010. The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bush, Christopher. 2017. “Areas: Bigger than the Nation, Smaller than the World.” In Futures of Comparative Literature, ed. Heise, Ursula K.. Routledge.Google Scholar
Casanova, Pascale. [1999] 2004. The World Republic of Letters. Trans. DeBevoise, Malcolm. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Barbara, Cassin, ed. 2014. Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Trans. Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski. Ed. Apter, Emily, Lezra, Jacques, and Wood, Michael. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2019. “The Planet: An Emergent Humanist Category.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 46, No. 1: 1–31.Google Scholar
Cheah, Pheng. 2016. What Is a World: Of Postcolonial Literature as World Literature. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
D’Haen, Theo. 2012. The Routledge Concise History of World Literature. Routledge.Google Scholar
D’Haen, Theo, Damrosch, David, and Kadir, Djelal, eds. 2011.The Routledge Companion to World Literature. Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton University Press,Google Scholar
Damrosch, David. 2006. The Buried Book: The Loss and Recovery of the Great Epic of Gilgamesh. Henry Holt and Company.Google Scholar
Damrosch, David. 2011. “Hugo Meltzel and the Principle of Polyglottism.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’Haen, Theo et al. Routledge, 12–20Google Scholar
Damrosch, David. Ed. 2014. World Literature in Theory. Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Dayeh, Islam. 2016. “The Potential of World Philology.” Philological Encounters, Vol. 1, Nos. 1–4: 396–418.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. 1983. “What Is a Minor Literature?” Mississippi Review, Vol. 11, No. 3: 13–33.Google Scholar
Eckermann, Johann Peter. 1964. Conversations with Goethe. Trans. Gisela C. O’Brien. Ungar.Google Scholar
Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “Polysystem Studies.” Poetics Today, Vol. 11, No. 1: 1–268.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. [1966] 1989. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Routledge.Google Scholar
Friedman, Susan Stanford, ed. 2015. Planetary Modernisms: Provocations of Modernity Across Time. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Ganguly, Debjani. 2008. “Literary Globalism in the New Millennium.” Postcolonial Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1: 119–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ganguly, Debjani. 2016. This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Gikandi, Simon. 1992.Writing in Limbo: Modernism and Caribbean Literature. Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Gikandi, Simon. 2011. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Guillén, Claudio. 1971. Literature as System: Towards the Theory of Literary History. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Guillén, Claudio 1993. The Challenge of Comparative Literature. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. 2008. “Shall We Continue to Write Histories of Literature?” New Literary History, Vol. 39, No. 3: 519–32.Google Scholar
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hayot, Eric. 2012. On Literary Worlds. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hayot, Eric, and Walkowitz, Rebecca, eds. 2016. A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Jameson, Fredric. 2002. The Singular Modernity. Verso.Google Scholar
Kadir, Djelal. 2011. Memos from the Besieged City: Lifelines for Cultural Sustainability. Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Lawall, Sarah, ed. 1994. Reading World Literature: Theory, History, Practice. University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Lawall, Sarah, and Mack, Maynard, eds. 1995. Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces. W. W. Norton & Co.Google Scholar
Levenson, Michael. 2011. Modernism. Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. 2013. “The Great Unwritten: World Literature and the Effacement of Orality.” Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 74, No. 2: 218–37.Google Scholar
Levy, Lital. 2015. Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mallette, Karla. 2010. European Modernity and the Arab Mediterranean: Toward a New Philology and a Counter-Orientalism. University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Mani, B. Venkat. 2017. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Cultures and Germany’s Pact with Books. Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
Marno, D. 2008. “The Monstrosity of Literature: Hugo Meltzl’s World Literature and Its Legacies.” In World Literature and World Culture, ed. Simonsen, K. M. and Stougaard-Nielsen, J.. Aarhus University Press, 37–50.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl, and Engels, Fredrich. 1969. The Communist Manifesto. In Marx/Engels Selected Works, Vol. I. Trans. Samuel Moore and F. Engels. Progress Publishers, 98–137.Google Scholar
Moretti, Franco. 2000. “Conjectures on World Literature.” New Left Review, Vol. 54, No. 1: 54–68.Google Scholar
Mufti, Aamir. 2010. “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 36, No. 3: 458–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mufti, Aamir. 2016. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literature. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Murphet, Julian. 2009. Multimedia Modernism: Literature and the Anglo-American Avant Garde. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Nair, Shankar. 2014. “Sufism as Medium and Method of Translation: Mughal Translations of Hindu Texts Reconsidered.” Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses, Vol. 43. No. 3: 390–410.Google Scholar
Nancy, Jean Luc. 2007. The Creation of the World or Globalization. Trans. Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew. SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1910. “Homer and Classical Philology.” InThe Complete Works of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Levy, Oscar ; trans. J. M. Kennedy. 18 vols. T. N. Foulis.Google Scholar
Okeke-Agulu, Chika. 2015. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth Century Nigeria. Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Osborne, Peter. 1995. The Politics of Time. Verso.Google Scholar
Pizer, John. 2011. Imagining the Age of Goethe in German Literature, 1970–2010. Camden House.Google Scholar
Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in Pre-modern India. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Pollock, Sheldon. 2009. “Future Philology: The Fate of Soft Science in a Hard World.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 4: 931–61.Google Scholar
Pollock, Sheldon, Elman, Benjamin A., and Chang, Ku-ming Kevin, eds. 2015. World Philology. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Prendergast, Christopher, ed. 2004. Debating World Literature. Verso.Google Scholar
Rabinow, Paul. 2008. Marking Time: On the Anthropology of the Contemporary. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, Ayesha. 2012. “A War of Worlds: Becoming ‘Early Modern’ and the Challenge of Comparison.” In Comparative Early Modernities: 1100–1800, ed. Porter, David. Palgrave Macmillan, 15–46.Google Scholar
Ramachandran, Ayesha. 2015. The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe. University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ramazani, Jahan. 2009. A Transnational Poetics. University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ricci, Ronit. 2011. Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion and the Arabic Cosmpolis in South and Southeast Asia. University of Chicago Press,.Google Scholar
Ronen, Ruth. 1994. Possible Worlds in Literary Theory. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Rosendahl Thomsen, M. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. (Continuum Literary Series). Continuum.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text and the Critic. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Said, Edward. 2003. Humanism and Democratic Criticism. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Saint-Amour, Paul. 2015. Tense Future: Modernism, Total War, Encyclopedic Form. Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saussy, Haun, ed. 2006. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Schmitz-Emans, Monika. 2011. “Richard Meyer’s Concept of World Literature.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’Haen, Theo, Damrosch, David, and Kadir, Djelal. Routledge, 49–61.Google Scholar
Schwab, Raymond. 1984.The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Trans. Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2003. Death of a Discipline. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Strich, Fritz. [1949] 2008. Goethe and World Literature. Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Thomsen, Mads Rosendahl. 2008. Mapping World Literature: International Canonization and Transnational Literatures. Continuum.Google Scholar
“Top 30 Languages of the World.” N.d. Vistawide World Languages and Cultures. www.vistawide.com/languages/top_30_languages.htm (accessed on November 27, 2019).Google Scholar
Jing, Tsu, 2010a. Sound and Script in the Chinese Diaspora. Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jing, Tsu 2010b. “Getting Ideas about World Literature in China.” Comparative Literature Studies, Vol. 47, No. 3: 290–213.Google Scholar
Vadde, Aarthi. 2018. Chimeras of Form: Modernist Internationalism Beyond Europe: 1914–2016. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. 2016. “Hijacking Translation: How Comp Lit Continues to Suppress Translated Texts.” Boundary 2, Vol. 43, No. 2: 179–204.Google Scholar
Villanueva, Dario. 2011. “Claudio Guillén:(World) Literature as System.” In The Routledge Companion to World Literature, ed. D’Haen, Theo, Damrosch, David, and Kadir, Djelal. Routledge, 108–16.Google Scholar
Waquet, Francoise. 2001. Latin or the Empire of a Sign. Trans. John Howe. Verso.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2006. Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Rebecca. 2017. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Wellek, Rene. 2009. “The Crisis of Comparative Literature.” In The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature: From the European Enlightenment to the Global Present, ed. Damrosch, David, Melas, Natalie, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi. Princeton University Press, 161–72.Google Scholar
Whitman, Walt. 1971. Song of Myself, Verse 52, Leaves of Grass. Eurasia Publishing House.Google Scholar
WreC [Warwick Research Collective]. 2015. Combined and Uneven Development: Toward a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool University Press.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
  • Book: The Cambridge History of World Literature
  • Online publication: 17 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064446.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
  • Book: The Cambridge History of World Literature
  • Online publication: 17 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064446.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Introduction
  • Edited by Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia
  • Book: The Cambridge History of World Literature
  • Online publication: 17 August 2021
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064446.001
Available formats
×