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The Locations of (World) Literature

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Location matters, for critics, readers and texts. This book explores the notion of location not simply as geographical, historical, or cultural context but as a standpoint, a position, an orientati...
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  • 20 February 2025
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Location matters, for critics, readers and texts. This book explores the notion of location not simply as geographical, historical, or cultural context but as a standpoint, a position, an orientation, a necessarily partial and particular perspective, however ample it may be, from which writers represent and imagine their worlds. However, the constraint of location in the form of a reductive geographical marker has been felt most acutely by writers of the Global South. This book explores how modern and contemporary writers from Africa and South Asia consider their place in the world, in world literature, and in the wider geographical regions or national literary histories which their work is identified with. What worlds do these literatures simultaneously inhabit and create? What networks do writers and institutions, specific genres and works of literature, but also circuits of readership, translation and publishing, produce? And what are the imagined or discrepant geographies, the different cosmopolitanisms, that may be invented in the process? This ground-up approach – from Lagos, Algier, Niamey, Addis Ababa or Allahabad; in English and in French but also in Swahili, Malayalam, Amharic, Urdu, Arabic, Persian, or Pulaar – can pluralize a map whose entanglements and complexities face the risk of being ironed out by reified conceptualizations of literature within global macro-systems.
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Price: $86.00
Pages: 262
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Textxet: Studies in Comparative Literature
Publication Date: 20 February 2025
ISBN: 9789004705821
Format: Hardcover
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"The book closes an obvious yet persistent gap in our academic practice, proceeding by a coherent, multifaceted analysis of literatures oscillating between colonial languages such as English and French and the ever-expanding range of major and minor African and Asian tongues such as Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Amharic, Swahili, and Pulaar, each of them inscribed in a deep chronology and non-colonial legacies. Tracing this novel, decentred, post-hegemonic vision of World Literature, the publication occupies a position at the forefront of contemporary literary studies. The authors provide a continuation to the project of rewriting global literary history initiated by scholars such as David Damrosch, combining a profound awareness of the theoretical foundations and the latest tendencies of comparative literary studies with their specialised expertise in non-European languages and cultures. The result is illuminating and relevant far beyond the narrow specialisms of their individual fields." – Ewa A. Łukaszyk, in: Kervan – International Journal of Afro-Asiatic Studies Vol. 29 No. 1 (2025), pp. 600-601

Francesca Orsini, Ph.D. (1996), is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian literature at SOAS, University of London. Her latest monograph is East of Delhi: Multilingual Literary Culture and World Literature (2023). She is an editor of the Journal of World Literature and of the Cambridge Studies in World Literature.

Laetitia Zecchini, Ph.D. (2007), is Director of Research at the CNRS, and writes on contemporary Indian poetry, postcolonial modernisms and print cultures, and literary activism. Her latest book is a co-edited volume The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form: Cold War, Decolonization and Third World Print Cultures (2022).