A comprehensive account of twentiethcentury world literature. Important writers are put into historical, critical, biographical, and sociological context.

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

opinion, the Guide offers a discriminating - and sometimes controversial - view of a broad range of contemporary literatures.

This is an exciting, and unsettling, time to be teaching world literature, writes David Damrosch. Because the range of works taught in world literature courses has expanded enormously, both historically and geographically, the task of selection—and of teacher preparation—has grown more challenging. Teachers of this field must grapple with such issues as coverage, cultural difference, and the role of translation in the classroom. Should one emphasize masterpieces or traditions, concepts or themes? How does one avoid making a work bear the burden of representing an entire tradition? To what extent should anthologies be used? Can a course be global in scope and yet focus on a few works, authors, moments? This collection of thirty-two essays in the MLA series Options for Teaching offers an array of solutions to these challenges, reflecting the wide variety of institutions, courses, and students described by the contributors. An annotated bibliography is provided, with a listing of useful Web sites.

Bringing together leading critics and literary scholars, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism argues for new ways of understanding the nature and development of twentieth-century literature and culture. Scholars have largely understood modernism as an American and European phenomenon. Those parameters have expanded in recent decades, but the incorporation of multiple origins and influences has often been tied to older conceptual frameworks that make it difficult to think of modernism globally. Providing alternative approaches, A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism introduces pathways through global archives and new frameworks that offer a richer, more representative set of concepts for the analysis of literary and cultural works. In separate essays each inspired by a critical term, this collection explores what happens to the foundational concepts of modernism and the methods we bring to modernist studies when we approach the field as a global phenomenon. Their work transforms the intellectual paradigms we have long associated with modernism, such as tradition, antiquity, style, and translation. New paradigms, such as context, slum, copy, pantomime, and puppets emerge as the archive extends beyond its European center. In bringing together and reexamining the familiar as well as the emergent, the contributors to this volume offer an invaluable and original approach to studying the intersection of world literature and modernist studies.

We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary traditions, levels differences between scripture, poetry, and prose, and fashions textual forms into a particular pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical practice. In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide—from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes. A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.