The Cambridge History of World Literature

Description

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.

Debjani Ganguly is Professor of English and Director of the Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures at the University of Virginia. She is the author of This Thing Called the World: The Contemporary Novel as Global Form (Duke, 2016) and Caste, Colonialism and Counter-Modernity (Routledge, 2005), and General Editor of the Cambridge History of World Literature (2 vols. forthcoming 2020). She is also the General Editor of the CUP book series Cambridge Studies in World Literature and Culture. Debjani has held visiting fellowships at the University of Chicago, University of Cambridge, University of Oxford, and University of Wisconsin-Madison.