The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Verbal imagery and visual images as well as the intricate relationships between verbal and visual representations have long shaped the imagination and the practice of intercultural relationships. The contributions to this volume take a fresh look at the ideology of form, especially the gendered and racial implications of the gaze and the voice in various media and intermedial transformations. Analyses of how culturally specific forms of visual and verbal expression are individually understood and manipulated complement reflections on the potential and limitations of representation. The juxtaposition of visual and verbal signifiers explores the gap between them as a space beyond cultural boundaries. Topics treated include: Caliban; English satirical iconotexts; Oriental travel writing and illustration; expatriate description and picturesque illustration of Edinburgh; ethnographic film; African studio photography; South African cartoons; imagery, ekphrasis, and race in South African art and fiction; face and visuality, representation and memory in Asian fiction; Bollywood; Asian historical film; Asian-British pop music; Australian landscape in painting and fiction; indigenous children’s fiction from Aotearoa New Zealand, Canada, and the USA; Canadian photography; Native Americans in film. Writers and artists discussed include: Philip Kwame Apagya; the Asian Dub Foundation; Breyten Breytenbach; Richard Burton; Peter Carey; Gurinder Chadha; Daniel Chodowiecki; J.M. Coetzee; Ashutosh Gowariker; Patricia Grace; W. Greatbatch; Hogarth; Francis K. Honny; Jim Jarmusch; Robyn Kahukiwa; Seydou Keita; Thomas King; Vladyana Krykorka; Alfred Kubin; Michael Arvaarluk Kusugak; Kathleen and Michael Lacapa; László Lakner; George Littlechild; Ken Lum; Franz Marc; Zakes Mda; Ketan Mehta; M.I.A. (Maya Arulpragasam); Timothy Mo; William Kent Monkman; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; John Hamilton Mortimer; Sidney Nolan; Jean Rouch; Salman Rushdie; William Shakespeare; Robert Louis Stevenson; Richard Van Camp; Zapiro.

This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views processes of institutionalization not as limitations, but as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observation that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academies and academics, critics, and readers, as well as authors themselves. This volume therefore substantiates, refines, as well as interrogates current approaches to world literature, such as those developed by David Damrosch, Pascale Casanova, and Emily Apter. Sections focus on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations of discrete archives of literature, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. The chapters contribute to a fresh understanding of how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems and, conversely, how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works. Focusing its methodological and theoretical inquiries on a broad archive of texts spanning the triangle Europe-Latin America-Africa, the volume unsettles North America as the self-evident vantage of recent world literature debates. Because of the volume’s focus on dialogues between world literature and fields such as postcolonial studies, translation studies, book history, and transnational studies, it will be of interest to scholars and students in a range of areas.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers a genealogy of anticolonial thought that advocated collective inexpertise, unknowing, and unrecognizability. Early-twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success, mastery, or national sovereignty. J. Daniel Elam shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of an impossibility: a world without colonialism. Framed by a suggestive reading of the surprising affinities between Frantz Fanon’s political writings and Erich Auerbach’s philological project, World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These anticolonial activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise but as a way, rather, to disavow mastery altogether. To become or remain an inexpert reader, divesting oneself of authorial claims, was to fundamentally challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and national sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early-twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics in the still-colonial present.

This volume discusses the past, present and future perspectives of literature in Japan, China and South Korea and its interface with India. Since this being a largely unexplored area, an attempt has been made to present a true picture of the literature and cultural milieu of the East Asian countries to the readers through well researched, thought-provoking and enlightening papers contributed by eminent scholars from India, Japan, China and Korea. It is a historical fact that India maintained strong cultural ties with East Asian countries directly or indirectly through religion and culture since ancient times. This cultural bond has become all the more significant and meaningful in this age of information technology and globalization. In this context, literature has a great role to play. To be precise, it is only through literature that this existing bond of cultural affinity among India and East Asian countries could be nurtured and strengthened. This book gives a vivid picture of the state of the past and present literary trends in Japan, China and South Korea, the influence of Indian literary trends and thought on their literatures, and the general perception and assimilation of East Asian literatures in India. This book would be a unique and comprehensive reference material for teachers, researchers, students, writers, and literary critics of Indian and East Asian literatures.

This book redefines modern Indian literature from a cosmopolitan comparative perspective inclusive of literature in English from India and the diaspora, in native languages, and works by non-Indians. It shows how, since the mid-19th century, Indian literary modernity pursued the conjunction of the sensuous and ethical/spiritual that characterized its three traditions (Sanskritik, Persian, and folk culture) while the encounter, both receptive and oppositional, with “the West” vastly expanded the Indian literary sphere. Aesthetics and ethics are not antithetical in the Indian cultural space, but the quest for an exclusive Indian identity versus universalist approaches offsets concerns for social justice as well as enjoyable embodied communication. The literary constellation, in many languages, now formed in and around India can be better apprehended as a virtual Cosmopolis, a commonwealth of elaborate emotions. The versatile figure of Hanuman metaphorically flies across this Ocean of Stories to make us discover new worlds of experience.