At a time increasingly dominated by globalization, migration, and the clash between supranational and ultranational ideologies, the relationship between language and borders has become more complicated and, in many ways, more consequential than ever. This book shows how concepts of ‘language’ and ‘multilingualism’ look different when viewed from Belize, Lagos, or London, and asks how ideas about literature and literary form must be remade in a contemporary cultural marketplace that is both linguistically diverse and interconnected, even as it remains profoundly unequal. Bringing together scholars from the fields of literary studies, applied linguistics, publishing, and translation studies, the volume investigates how multilingual realities shape not only the practice of writing but also modes of literary and cultural production. Chapters explore examples of literary multilingualism and their relationship to the institutions of publishing, translation, and canon-formation. They consider how literature can be read in relation to other multilingual and translational forms of contemporary cultural circulation and what new interpretative strategies such developments demand. In tracing the multilingual currents running across a globalized world, this book will appeal to the growing international readership at the intersections of comparative literature, world literature, postcolonial studies, literary theory and criticism, and translation studies.

This volume investigates outstanding figures and configurations of literary and cultural multilingualism on a transcontinental and on a global scale. Its first focus is on the both subcontinental and transcontinental Indies, on the oxymoronic figure of East West India and on the stirring 'relations through words' in Luso-Afro-Indian, Anglo-Indian, and Indo-European areas. The second focus is on the cross-cultural configuration of East and West shaped by some striking Sino-European and Sino-American events in early modern and modern times. A third issue concerns the glocal and globoglot 'people of paper' in a contemporary Californian town, and, lastly, the all-embracing, all-devouring ouroboros and other multi-lingual ophidians. (Series: poethik polyglott, Vol. 4) [Subject: Linguistics, Multilingualism]

With contributions from leading scholars all around the world, this volume underlines the ever-pressing need for new language in education policies to include all learners’ voices in the multilingual classroom and to empower teachers to develop responsive and transformative pedagogies. Using testimonies, narratives and examples from different international contexts, this book points clearly to what can be achieved practically in the multilingual classroom so that multilingual learners’ voices are legitimated, while also addressing the complex inter-relating sociolinguistic issues around the promotion of bilingualism and multilingualism in education.

The fourth volume of the collected papers of the ICLA congress “The Many Languages of Comparative Literature” includes articles that study thematic and formal elements of literary texts. Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often provoked controversies, most contributions here treat them as internally connected. While theoretical considerations inform many of the readings, the main interest of most articles can be described as rhetorical (in the widest sense) – given that the ancient discipline of rhetoric did not only include the study of rhetorical figures and tropes such as metaphor, irony, or satire, but also that of topoi, which were originally viewed as the ‘places’ where certain arguments could be found, but later came to represent the arguments or intellectual themes themselves. Another feature shared by most of the articles is the tendency of ‘undeclared thematology’, which not only reflects the persistence of the charge of positivism, but also shows that most scholars prefer to locate themselves within more specific, often interdisciplinary fields of literary study. In this sense, this volume does not only prove the ongoing relevance of traditional fields such as rhetoric and thematology, but provides contributions to currently flourishing research areas, among them literary multilingualism, literature and emotions, and ecocriticism.

This collection showcases a multivalent approach to the study of literary multilingualism, embodied in contemporary Nordic literature. While previous approaches to literary multilingualism have tended to take a textual or authorship focus, this book advocates for a theoretical perspective which reflects the multiplicity of languages in use in contemporary literature emerging from increased globalization and transnational interaction. Drawing on a multimodal range of examples from contemporary Nordic literature, these eighteen chapters illustrate the ways in which multilingualism is dynamic rather than fixed, resulting from the interactions between authors, texts, and readers as well as between literary and socio-political institutions. The book highlights the processes by which borders are formed within the production, circulation, and reception of literature and in turn, the impact of these borders on issues around cultural, linguistic, and national belonging. Introducing an innovative approach to the study of multilingualism in literature, this collection will be of particular interest to students and researchers in literary studies, cultural studies, and multilingualism.

Poetica et Metrica 2. One of the most fascinating aspects of the poetics of multilingualism is that it reveals national literatures to be an outcome of transcultural reflection. This kind of reflection can surface in lexical borrowings and inventions, in attempts at imitating foreign language features, and in combining and improvising stylistic and linguistic devices. The experiments presented in this book range from idiosyncratic and “forced” solutions to the partly unconscious creation of new genres from situations of cultural contact. Multilingualism, as such, turns out to be basic for the emergence of vernacular literatures. While research on the poetics of multilingualism is usually restricted to specific authors, languages, genres or epochs, this book addresses the issue from the perspective of its general systematics, and reflects the diversity of the phenomenon. It provides facets from individual authors’ poetics to conventionalised features of poetics, and from written to oral and sung products of multilingual creation. By focusing on the topic’s ontology, its basic categories and relations, the volume demonstrates the fundamental importance of multilingualism for literary and linguistic theory with studies on a number of European countries and regions, including multilingualism in the literature and literary traditions of the Alsace, the Basque Country, England, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Russia, Sardinia, and Spain.