The Cambridge Companion to World Literature

Description

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.

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 Sklodowska-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.

'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