Literature from the Peripheries: Refrigerated Culture and Pluralism is a critical and literary inquiry into the cultures and communities which exist only in peripheries. The book theorizes the idea of refrigerated cultures with literary examples.

This book illustrates how internationalist writers marginalized the West and placed the non-Western regions in a new center.

This book explores the meanings of European peripheries in postcolonial literary imagination. While colonial discourses have constructed Europe as the centre, the continent is internally divided into centres and peripheries. Approaching the question of European peripherality in a variety of geographical and linguistic contexts and across national and diasporic literary traditions of postcolonial writing, the contributions in this volume attest to the entangled and relational character of the centre/periphery nexus. Acknowledging the unbalanced power structures between centres and peripheries, the volume sets out to challenge conventional ideas about peripheries and places European peripheral loci at the centre of postcolonial literary inquiry. The chapters in the volume draw on diverse theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to address, among others, the link between peripherality and provincialism, the relations between intra-European and colonial peripheries, and the progressive potential of European peripheries as postcolonial spaces. The chapters in this book were originally published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Bringing together the analyses of the literary world-system, translation studies, and the research of European cultural nationalism, this book contests the view that texts can be attributed global importance irrespective of their origin, language, and position in the international book market. Focusing on Slovenian literature, almost unknown to world literature studies, this book addresses world literature’s canonical function in the nineteenth-century process of establishing European letters as national literatures. Aware of their dependence on imperial powers, (semi)peripheral national movements sought international recognition through, among other things, the newly invented figure of the national poet. Writers central to dependent national communities were canonized to represent their respective cultures to the norm-giving Other – the emerging world literary canon and its aesthetic ideology. Hence, national literatures asserted their linguo-cultural individuality through the process of worlding; that is, by their positioning in the international literary world informed by the supposed universality of the aesthetic.

Representing reality in terms of secure, familiar centres and dangerous, lesser known peripheries is one of the most elementary human cognitive instincts. However, we live in a world where this established division is becoming more and more problematic. One person’s periphery can be another’s centre, and many simple geographies of the world and of the mind, clearly separating the known from the unknown, have become obsolete. How can one reconcile this complexity with the fact that human thinking cannot escape the centre/periphery dichotomy? How is it possible to find one’s way in a world in which peripheries become centres, and centres turn into peripheries? The chapters of this book try to determine how the problem of centres and peripheries has been dealt with in the domains of literature and culture. The contributors focus on different aspects of the issue – from travel writing, through attempts at mapping the self, to finding central and peripheral territories in narrative itself.

Essays on the Peripheries contains essays written by translator and scholar Peter Valente over a twenty-year period, stretching from the 1990s to 2019. They are a record of literary exploration and discovery, concerned with the recovery of lost works, with those writers whose works were out of print or hard to find, and whose names were somehow not fashionable in the current discourse, but who are important nevertheless. Edouard Roditi, Barbara Barg, and Tom Savage, for example, should be better known, but their books are largely ignored. This collection of essays highlights those works on the periphery, such as Turkish poets Seyhan Erözçelik and Küçük İskender, while it also includes several essays on better-known queer authors like Pierre Guyotat and Pier Paolo Pasolini, focusing on often overlooked qualities in their work that bear looking at closely. These essays on works of literature are complemented by a number of texts on jazz, again highlighting important and interesting figures in the world of jazz and free improvisation that may have fallen through the cracks, such as the pianist Richard Twardzick and the Ganelin trio, which recorded their great experimental work Ancora da Capo in 1980, behind the Iron Curtain. Attention is also to given to more popular figures such as Stan Getz. The volume is completed with a series of essays reappraising Roman poets in the twenty-first century, offering fresh new translations and readings of authors such as Catullus and Callimachus. A collection of essays, like an anthology, is by its nature incomplete. Essays on the Peripheries is a kind of sketch, rather than a finished portrait, of the author's changing impressions on various subjects over the years.

Representing reality in terms of secure, familiar centres and dangerous, lesser known peripheries is one of the most elementary human cognitive instincts. However, we live in a world where this established division is becoming more and more problematic. One personâ (TM)s periphery can be anotherâ (TM)s centre, and many simple geographies of the world and of the mind, clearly separating the known from the unknown, have become obsolete. How can one reconcile this complexity with the fact that human thinking cannot escape the centre/periphery dichotomy? How is it possible to find oneâ (TM)s way in a world in which peripheries become centres, and centres turn into peripheries? The chapters of this book try to determine how the problem of centres and peripheries has been dealt with in the domains of literature and culture. The contributors focus on different aspects of the issue â " from travel writing, through attempts at mapping the self, to finding central and peripheral territories in narrative itself.