Introduction
Journal: Journal of World Literature
Year: 2022

Abstract This introduction examines the two main questions explored in the special issue: What does the Cold War’s interweaving of international politics and global war disclose about contemporary world literature discourse? What does world literature (as idea, program, and, more importantly, as reality of writing and reading beyond the framework of the nation-state) tell us about the Cold War and its discursive reliance on rhetorical ambiguity? We depart from the major approaches to literature’