The Cambridge Companion to World Literature

by Ben Etherington (Editor), Jarad Zimbler (Editor)

Overview

The Cambridge Companion to World Literature introduces the significant ideas and practices of world literary studies. It provides a lucid and accessible account of the fundamental issues and concepts in world literature, including the problems of imagining the totality of literature; comparing literary works across histories, cultures and languages; and understanding how literary production is affected by forces such as imperialism and globalization. The essays demonstrate how detailed critical engagements with particular literary texts call forth differing conceptions of world literature, and, conversely, how theories of world literature shape our practices of readings. Subjects covered include cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, internationalism, scale and systems, sociological criticism, translation, scripts, and orality. This book also includes original analyses of genres and forms, ranging from tragedy to the novel and graphic fiction, lyric poetry to the short story and world cinema.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781108612036
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	11/22/2018
Series:	Cambridge Companions to Literature
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	22 MB
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About the Author

Ben Etherington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. His monograph, Literary Primitivism (2017) argues for a global conception of primitivism as a utopian reaction to the apotheosis of European imperialism. He is currently a Chief Investigator on the three-year Australian Research Council project Other Worlds, for which he is working with eminent Australian writers, including Alexis Wright and J. M. Coetzee, to explore the idiosyncratic ways in which writers create literary worlds. He is also known as a public commentator on universities and Australian literature.
Jarad Zimbler is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham, and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the University of Illinois, Chicago. His previous publications bring together a range of approaches, from narratology and stylistics, to book history and the sociology of literature. His first monograph, J. M. Coetzee and the Politics of Style (Cambridge, 2014), was shortlisted for the 2016 University English Book Prize. In his new research project, Literary Communities and Literary Worlds, he examines several mid-twentieth-century authors who moved from one literary field to another, and who re-shaped their practices in response to their new literary environments.

Table of Contents

Introduction Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler; Part I. Worlds: 1. Cosmopolitanism and world literature Timothy Brennan; 2. Nation, transnationalism, and internationalism Anna Bernard; 3. Scales, systems, and meridians Ben Etherington; 4. Literary worlds and literary fields Jarad Zimbler; 5. Translation and the circuits of world literature Stefan Helgesson; 6. Scriptworlds Sowon Park; 7. Ecologies of orality Liz Gunner; Part II. Practices: 8. Lyric universality Boris Maslov; 9. On worlding tragedy Ato Quayson; 10. The novel and consciousness of labour Neil Lazarus; 11. The worldliness of graphic narrative Charlotta Salmi; 12. Short story and peripheral production Shital Pravinchandra; 13. World cinema, world literature and dialectical criticism Keya Ganguly; 14. Publishing, translating, worldmaking Chris Andrews.

Editorial Reviews

'The Cambridge Companion to World Literature helpfully pushes the boundaries of any idea(s) of 'world literature' - and, usefully, does so from a variety of angles, as it were. As the Introduction makes clear, there's no ambition to be comprehensive here; instead, the Companion presents a variety of perspectives and foci, and usefully projects beyond them, making for a nicely wide-ranging starting point …' M. A. Orthofer, The Complete Review (www.complete-review.com)

'This book will serve as a companion for anyone’s literary travels and for critical commitments needed for the journey.' A. P. Church, Choice

From the Publisher