bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The long non‐coding RNA DANCR regulates the inflammatory phenotype of breast cancer cells and promotes breast cancer progression via EZH2‐dependent suppression of SOCS3 transcription
Authors: Zhang Ke‐Jing , Tan Xiao‐Lang , Guo Lei
Published: December 2019

Long non‐coding RNA (lncRNA) is involved in the regulation of tumorigenesis and metastasis. In this study, we focused on the clinical relevance, biological effects, and molecular mechanisms of the lncRNA differentiation antagonizing non‐protein coding RNA (DANCR) in breast cancer. We compared the expression of DANCR between breast cancer and normal tissues, and between breast cancer cell lines and normal breast epithelial cells using quantitative real‐time PCR (qRT‐PCR) analysis. By knocking down and overexpressing DANCR, we assessed its significance in regulating viability (MTT assay), migration/invasion (Transwell assay), epithelial‐mesenchymal transition (western blot), stemness (mammosphere formation assay and western blot), and production of inflammatory cytokines (qRT‐PCR and ELISA) of breast cancer cells in vitro, as well as xenograft growth in vivo. Furthermore, using ChIP and RNA immunoprecipitation, we examined the reciprocal regulation between DANCR and suppressor of cytokine signaling 3 (SOCS3) in breast cancer. DANCR was significantly up‐regulated in tissue samples from patients with breast cancer, as well as in breast cancer cell lines, as compared with normal tissues and breast epithelial cells, respectively. The highest DANCR expression levels were associated with advanced tumor grades or lymph node metastasis. DANCR was necessary and sufficient to control multiple malignant phenotypes of breast cancer cells in vitro and xenograft growth in vivo. Mechanistically, DANCR promoted the binding of enhancer of zeste homolog 2 (EZH2) to the promoter of SOCS3, thereby epigenetically inhibiting SOCS3 expression. Functionally, SOCS3 up‐regulation or EZH2 inhibition could rescue multiple malignant phenotypes induced by DANCR. Our data indicate that DANCR is a pleiotropic oncogenic lncRNA in breast cancer. Boosting SOCS3 expression may reverse the oncogenic activities of DANCR and thus provide a therapeutic strategy for breast cancer treatment.
Ovid'sMetamorphoses: Changing Worlds
Authors: Liveley Genevieve
Published: December 2019

Nearly 2000 years before Goethe welcomed a break with national literature and the dawn of a new epoch of world literature, the Roman poet Ovid was already claiming such status for his epic work,Metamorphoses. Ovid begins and ends his poem with programmatic declarations concerning its global significance and reach, marking theMetamorphosesas a work of world literatureavant le lettre. But we are also invited to question the wider implications of this, and to consider what is at stake when the city of Rome (urbs) becomes synonymous with the world (orbis), when world history and world stories become synonymous with Roman history and Roman stories.
Gilgamesh: A Cultural Seismograph
Authors: Ziolkowski Theodore
Published: December 2019

This chapter traces the reception of the ancient epic of Gilgamesh from its rediscovery in 1872 to the present. A recapitulation of the standard version is followed by an account of its rediscovery. Initially fascinating for its biblical associations, it incited the turn‐of‐the‐century Babel/Bible controversy and soon caught the attention of thinkers like Freud and Jung. Between the two world wars the epic, translated into many languages, began to gain worldwide popularity and frequent mention among writers like Rilke, Hesse, and Thomas Mann. After World War II this popularity led to imaginative adaptations in literature, music, and art that reflected such cultural trends as feminism, gay pride, and ecology. Historical novels imposed modern issues on the fictional past while others detected an analogy for contemporary problems in the Middle East. In recent decades Gilgamesh has had a more pervasive cultural impact than other biblical or mythological heroes.
Heliodorus'Aithiopika: The Birth of the Novel
Authors: Konstan David
Published: December 2019

Heliodorus' novel,Aithiopika, is one of five surviving Greek novels. Although English‐speaking critics had generally demoted the ancient novels to the status of “romance,” in contrast with the modern bourgeois novel said to have arisen in the eighteenth century, these ancient prose narratives of love are in fact fully realized novels. What is more, they display a rich sense of character and character development, even though some critics have called this aspect into question. As the longest and most complex of the Greek novels, Heliodorus'Aithiopikahas an especially rich narrative structure and depiction of character. It is no wonder that Sir Philip Sidney placed it in the same class as Homer'sIliadandOdyssey.
Renewal in and through Landscape: The Great Medieval Chinese Poet Xie Lingyun
Authors: Goh Meow Hui
Published: December 2019

Though hailed as the first master of landscape poetry, Xie Lingyun (385–433) is not as widely read as other major poets of premodern China. His eventful life and difficult personality were not viewed with approval by traditional critics, and his allusion‐laden language taxed readers. But the revival of interest in Xie Lingyun and his works in recent scholarship promises new understanding: his integration of embodied experience and book knowledge through poetic language reveals his art to be highly pragmatic – one employed for resolvingreallife issues. Read in light of current environmental problems, his poetics gains the potential for renewing our connection to nature and to each other. Once we allow ourselves to be slowed by his intricate sensibility, his elegant diction, and his rich references, we will be transported to mountains and rivers, hearing their voices. He is one of the earliest poet‐explorers of the natural landscape in world literature, preceding more well‐known nature poets such as William Wordsworth and Matsuo Bashō, and he is vital to our shared human heritage.
We Are the World: Subjectivity and Universality in theOdesof Horace
Authors: McNeill Randall L.B.
Published: December 2019

This chapter considers theOdesof Horace, the most famous work of one of the best‐known poets of the Augustan period of Latin literature, as the poet's extended exploration of his interconnected literary identities as an aging man, as an unsuccessful lover, as a friend, and as a private citizen under the new political regime of the emperor Augustus. It argues that Horace uses the depiction of his subjective responses to the circumstances of his life to call attention to what he presents as universal aspects of the human condition. His expectation that his readers will accept the validity of the individual perspective that he models for them is paralleled by his assumption of continued Roman cultural dominance, which provides the underlying context for his predictions of literary immortality.
Bridge Essay: The Cuneiform World: A Difficult Text Network
Authors: Weeden Mark
Published: December 2019

The cuneiform world does not know authors in the popular modern understanding of the word as a creator of textex nihilo. At the same time it is difficult to delineate evidence for text networks in the same way as for the medieval world, due to the fact that the social contexts of the cuneiform inscription of literature were usually scholarly rather than popular. Scholarly networks can, but do not have to, encourage greater uniformity of textual transmission.
Image, Imagined, and Imagination in
Silappadikaram
Authors: Rao H. Kalpana
Published: December 2019

Silappadikaram
(
Śilappadikāram
, The jeweled anklet) is a Tamil text from the early centuries of the Common Era which is believed to be a composition of Jain values and has been idealized as a classic work of the Tamil culture as well as a text that embodies the model of an idyllic womanhood. The aim of this chapter is to look beyond these specific cultural definitions and visualize how the classic could be interpreted as a materialization of literature into various platforms. This classic work of Tamil literature implicitly questions the nature of genre, narrator, frame narrative, audience or readership, and artistic representation. The work thus offers a worldview that is expansive.
Love, Politics, and the Premodern Theater: Perspectives on Kalidasa's
Shakuntala
Authors: Culp Amanda
Published: December 2019

This chapter examines the historical context, major themes, and distinctive theatricality of the premodern Indian play
The Abhijnanashakuntalam
(
Abhijñānaśākuntalam
), often translated as
The Recognition of Shakuntala
, or simply
Shakuntala
(
Śakuntalā
). Written by the Sanskrit poet Kalidasa (Kālidāsa) in the late fourth/early fifth century
ce
,
Shakuntala
dramatizes the romance, separation, and reunion of its eponymous heroine and King Dushyanta (Duṣyanta) of Hastinapura (Hastināpura). While much has been written regarding the play's literary merits, such focus obscures the specificity of the theater culture for which Kalidasa wrote. Reading the play alongside other dramatic works by Kalidasa, as well as the dramaturgical treatise known as the
Natyashastra
(
Nātyaśāstra
), this chapter foregrounds the traces of premodern Indian theater culture preserved by the play, claiming it as a critical work of world theater as well as world literature.
Introduction to World Literature 601ceto 1450ce
Authors: Chism Christine
Published: December 2019

This introduction explains the organization of thispart of theCompanionand previews some of its contents. What are the problems and political consequences of periodizing the era between 601 and 1450, both as a “middle age” and as “premodern”? How do world literary paradigms develop in the wake of postcolonial studies and in the aftermath of Western and European hegemony address world systems that preexisted these massive global transformations? World‐systems theory and Alexander Beecroft's proposal of literary ecozones and biomes invite scale‐sensitive engagements with the complex world systems in which these literatures were produced. By using these approaches and with the help of the eight bridge topics that structure thepart, we can study how literatures were created, translated, and transmitted between local, translocal, cosmopolitan, vernacular, national, and global entrepôts. The introduction concludes with the questions raised by each of the bridge topics as they connect to ideas of world literature.
Walls of Inclusivity: Dante'sDivine Comedyand World Literature
Authors: Kumar Akash
Published: December 2019

This chapter considers the issues of vernacularizing that emerge in Dante'sDivine Comedy, specifically in the vein of hybrid language, cultural difference, and moments of heterodoxy that open the text out to the realm of world literature. Its approach is balanced between an analysis of Dante's vernacular translation that combines different languages together and a consideration of the cultural other within theComedy. Somewhat contrary to its status as a medieval Christian vision, I sustain that theComedy's celebration of cultural difference and its forging of a new vernacular language set it apart as a global text that continues to provoke new insights into intercultural relations.
Ma Zhiyuan Reworks Bai Juyi
Authors: Idema Wilt L.
Published: December 2019

The second half of the thirteenth century witnessed the emergence ofzajuas a major genre of theater. Ma Zhiyuan belonged with Guan Hanqing and Bai Pu to the earliest generations of playwrights. Ma's most famous play isAutumn in the Palace of Hanand he also wrote a number of deliverance plays, but this chapter discusses his stagecraft by analyzingTears on the Blue Gown, an adaptation of the story of the banishment of the Tang poet Bai Juyi to Jiangzhou (Jiujiang) where he wrote his popularBallad of the Lute, in which he describes a chance encounter with a once‐famous courtesan from the capital who had been abandoned by her husband.
Babri Mosque, Bollywood, and Gender:Ramcharitmanasas World Literature
Authors: Tiwari Bhavya
Published: December 2019

From Bollywood to medieval literary traditions, from contemporary literary festivals to the divisive politics on the Indian subcontinent,Ramcharitmanas(Rāmacaritamānasa) captures the imagination of South Asians and beyond. A.K. Ramanujan, a poet and scholar, once said that no one ever readsRamayana(Rāmāyana) for the first time in South Asia; they all know it. Yet, each Ramkatha (Rāmkātha, story of Rama) differs from the others. Composed in the Avadhi language in 1574 Tulsidas's (Tulsidāsa)Ramcharitmanaspresents a strong case to be studied as world literature in the local and global traditions. This chapter focuses onRamcharitmanas's textual history, its afterlife in Bollywood, its haunting presence in the backdrop of the demolition of Babri mosque, and the debates it generates in contemporary Indian literature and literary festivals. The chapter concludes with remarks on the roleRamcharitmanascould play in the debates on world literature and comparative literature.
Bridge Essay: Wisdom and Mysticism: On Transcendence and Literariness
Authors: Yamini‐Hamedani Azadeh
Published: December 2019

Mysticism, in many respects, is concerned with facing and overcoming limitations, be it the limitations of language or the entrapments of the self. Practices meant to invoke mystical experience, from rituals of devotion and meditation to asceticism and chanting, are all attempts in transcendence. Transcendence can spark creativity and literariness as it points out the futility of given categories and concepts. Because words come into being by differentiating, because language is rooted in concepts and categories, using language to paint a state of unity proves to be an interesting challenge. This challenge has given mystics an awareness of language as a struggle for translation.
Mirabai's Poetry: The Worlding of a Hindu Woman Saint's Dynamic Song Tradition
Authors: Martin Nancy M.
Published: December 2019

The sixteenth‐century Hindu devotional woman poet‐saint Mirabai (Mīrābāī) is lauded as the preeminent premodern Hindi poetess, representative of medieval Indian women's literary accomplishment, spirituality, and independence. A familiarity with her life story and devotional Hinduism are essential background to understanding poetry in her voice, yet because of the oral nature of these traditions, the attachment of her name to a song is not a guarantee of individual authorship. In this chapter, I will introduce the reader to her collaborative voice, exploring the themes and sensibilities that mark poetry sung and composed in Mirabai's name, exposing the politics of the established literary canon of her poetry and her entry into world literature, and highlighting marginalized oral traditions of resistance and critique from India and the participation of global translators in ongoing co‐authorship in the saint's voice.
Bridge Essay: War and the Worlding of Story
Authors: Ouyang Wen‐chin
Published: December 2019

The chapter examines war as a paradoxical site of both carnage and exuberant cultural exchange. People, ideas, and stories circulate across “enemy” lines when the conquerors and conquered are forced to live in intimate proximity. The chapter concentrates on the love‐at‐a‐time‐of‐war motif in premodern Chinese and Arabic literatures, arguing that the encounter with the cultural other serves as a mechanism for family making and empire building. Attending to stories fromXue Dingshan, theDhat al‐Himma(Dhāt al‐Himma) Arabic epic, and al‐Tanukhi's (al‐Tanūkhī's) (d. 994)Relief After Hardship, this chapter suggests that war drives the process of worlding.
Wolfram von Eschenbach'sParzival: A Complex Reshaping and Expansion of a Source
Authors: Meyer Evelyn
Published: December 2019

Wolfram von Eschenbach'sParzivalis based on Chrétien de Troyes's unfinishedPerceval, le Conte du Graal, but is not merely a translation of the source text. Wolfram works with his source and reshapes it in significant ways, thus making his narrative style, content, and message far more complex by infusing them with his own vast learning and by taking the common narrative structure of medieval Romances, the double cycle, and multiplying it throughout the narrative. At the same time, Wolfram links this structural complexity to his thematic interests about the Orient and the Christian West, the secular Arthurian and the spiritual Grail realm, the story's two main heroes, Parzival and Gawan, Christianity and heathendom, and the peoples of black and white races. Wolfram weighs in on contemporary issues throughout his narrative, sometimes critically, sometimes favorably, but always reshaping contemporary discourses.
TheTale of the Heike: War Narrative and the Boundaries of Literature in Medieval and ModernJapan
Authors: Selinger Vyjayanthi Ratnam
Published: December 2019

TheTale of the Heikewas pivotal in shaping the historical memory of the Genpei War of 1180–1185 in Japan. Circulating both orally and textually, it reached broad segments of the population unhindered by the constraints of literacy. Performance genres took up key episodes, enhancing its cultural currency as historical narrative. In the late sixteenth century, a simplified form of the narrative was printed by the Jesuit press in Japan as a primer on Japanese history and language, an episode that reveals how texts are transformed through the translingual demands of missionary encounters. Lionized as Japan's own “epic” by early twentieth‐century intellectuals anxious to give Japan a heroic past, it was reread again in postwar Japan as an early democratic text about the overthrow of aristocratic order. TheTale of the Heikeis a dynamic text of world literature that, through its reception history, raises provocative questions about how “literariness” is construed in national, comparative, and cross‐regional frames.
Bridge Essay: “Home” and “Abroad” in Medieval Travel and Trade Narratives
Authors: Khanmohamadi Shirin A.
Published: December 2019

This introduction surveys some of the major genres and authors of medieval travel writing, focusing primarily on the Jewish, Latin Christian, and Islamic traditions and on cross‐cultural interchange in medieval contact zones like the Silk Roads. World Literature scholars will find that premodern travel narratives raise many of the same questions that have long been central to the world literature discipline, without always offering familiar answers. I close with New World travel writings and their inheritance of medieval ideas.
Mechthild von Magdeburg and the Mystical Poetry ofThe Flowing Light of the Godhead
Authors: Poor Sara S.
Published: December 2019

This chapter examinesThe Flowing Light of the Godhead(Das fließende Licht der Gottheit) by Mechthild von Magdeburg at the intersection of its various modes of circulation (translation, copying, and anthologization) in the centuries following Mechthild's death (c. 1282). This examination reveals a situation in which the transmission beyond the cultural boundaries in which the book was produced resulted not in world literature status, but rather in obscurity. Second, the chapter focuses on close readings of two chapters from the book in order to demonstrate how its literary qualities relate to its subsequent path back into the world literature sphere in more recent times.
ChristinedePizan: A Literary Champion of MedievalEurope
Authors: McWebb Christine
Published: December 2019

In this chapter, I outline Christine de Pizan's intellectual and professional trajectory as a female writer of the French late Middle Ages. I pay particular attention to her use of rhetoric and language, her development from a writer of lyrical poetry to a recognized author writing sociopolitically engaged prose, and the construction of allegory in her prose works.
Abu Nuwas: Poet of Wine, Desire, the Hunt, and the Abbasid Empire
Authors: Sharlet Jocelyn
Published: December 2019

Abu Nuwas (Abū Nuwās) (756–758 – 813–815ce) was a leading Arabic poet who transformed Arabic poetry about wine, love, the obscene, and hunting in ways that influenced poetry from the Iberian Peninsula and France to Iran and India. He also contributed to the traditions of ascetic, praise, elegy, censure, and invective poetry. Abu Nuwas was born in southwest Iran and lived mainly in Basra and Baghdad.
The Glory and the End of the Heroic World in theNibelungenlied
Authors: Classen Albrecht
Published: December 2019

The Middle High GermanNibelungenliedwas copied down around 1200 and has always been recognized as one of the canonical texts of medieval German literature. As a heroic epic, however, it also enjoys the status of a contribution to world literature, being a powerful representative of its genre, certainly on the same level as the Old EnglishBeowulf, the IcelandicNjál's Saga, the Old FrenchChanson de Roland, or the Old SpanishEpic of the Cid. Although thematically unique compared to those texts, readers throughout the past 200 years have recognized that this epic poem deals with fundamental questions pertaining to human life in its tragic dimension, a common element in all world literature.
The
Book
of
Dede
Korkut
and the Nomadology of World Literature
Authors: Oruc Firat
Published: December 2019

The Book of Dede Korkut
is a collection epic folk tales of the Turkic Oghuz tribes which circulated orally as they moved across Central Asia and the Middle East. As a record of nomadic living before and beyond empire and global order,
The Book of Dede Korkut
is not fixed in one place or confined by one single worldview. Rather, it resists territorialization and predetermined generic categorization in terms of its transformation from orality to written text, translation into multiple languages, and classification as different genres in different literary traditions. Through variations, improvisations, and additions across multiple times and space, it becomes a migrant text in a manner similar to the Oghuz people themselves. Through this lens, this chapter analyzes the structure, content, and representation of certain motifs that the Oghuz use to articulate their sense of lineage, tribe, and cosmology. These motifs are central to questions of how the Oghuz see themselves vis‐à‐vis the Other, their livelihood, ideal performances of masculinity, and the reproduction of the tribe.
The
Lusiads
Affect: Standing in the Middle of the Sea
Authors: Barletta Vincent
Published: December 2019

In this chapter I begin by discussing the impact that Luís Vaz de Camões's epic masterwork,
The Lusiads
(
Os Lusíadas
, 1572), has had on the long epic tradition in Portugal and Brazil. After this, I present a brief account of the text's many translations and its subsequent entry into the broader stream of “world literature.” I then examine key approaches to the text, beginning with Manuel de Faria e Sousa's 1639 commentary, a study that has in many senses not been surpassed. I then turn to a focused problematization of readings that have approached the text as a “Western” epic of “Eastern” conquest.
ThePhilokalia: Corrugating the Texture of Christian‐Inspired Literature
Authors: Dmitriev Kirill
Published: December 2019

ThePhilokaliais a title of large anthologies of Christian spiritual texts from the fourth to fifteenth centuries, first published in print at the end of the eighteenth century. The literary form of most philokalic texts adopts thekephalaia‐genre, which was popular in the Byzantine literature and has its historical roots in the works of Greek and Latin antique literatures. As a Christian spiritual text, thePhilokaliacontinues the tradition ofPatericaand has the Christian virtue of love as its central subject. The Russian translation known asDobrotolubiyeand the bookThe Way of the Pilgrimsignificantly contributed to the popularization of thePhilokalia, which became one of the most widely read and translated works of Christian spiritual literature today. Providing an expression of a living tradition, thePhilokaliaremains a dynamic textual corpus transcending linguistic, chronological, and geographical boundaries and exercising considerable impact on various religious, literary, and cultural developments.
Kabir: Iconoclastic Mystic of India
Authors: Hess Linda
Published: December 2019

Kabir (Kabīr) was a fifteenth‐century north Indian poet who composed orally in an early form of modern Hindi. He quickly became famous among vernacular poets associated with
bhakti
– passionate devotion, personal experience of ultimate reality, and related observations of life. His devotion is often called
nirguṇ
: pointing to a supreme being beyond form or language. Works attributed to him were recorded in sixteenth‐century manuscripts and later in print and other media, constituting an ever‐growing corpus. Uniquely combining religious‐spiritual and social‐political themes, Kabir belonged to a family of Muslim weavers of low social and economic status. Many of his sectarian followers today belong to Dalit (former “untouchable”) communities. Rooted in intermingled Hindu and Muslim traditions, Kabir refused both, criticized sectarian identities, and spoke in an anti‐authoritarian voice to urge individual awakening, self‐knowledge, fierce honesty, and compassion. His works have been sung in countless styles and contexts for six centuries.
The
Guru
Granth
Sahib
as a World Literary Dialogue
Authors: Singh Pashaura
Published: December 2019

This chapter locates the
Guru Granth Sahib
, the primary scripture of the Sikhs, in the large context of world literature. The
Guru Granth Sahib
represents the 500 years of literary heritage of North India ranging historically from the twelfth century to the seventeenth. It includes the works of the first five Sikh Gurus and the ninth, plus material by four bards (Sattā, Balvaṇḍ, Sundar, and Mardānā), eleven Bhaṭṭs (
“
court poets
”
who composed and recited panegyrics in praise of the Gurus), and 15 Bhagats or
“
devotees,” including the medieval poets Kabir, Namdev, Ravidas, and Farid – a total of 36 contributors. The chapter highlights how the text becomes a site of dialogue with literary traditions, as it registers dissent from ritualistic religious traditions.
John Milton
Authors: Forsyth Neil
Published: December 2019

The major works of John Milton, the greatest English poet of the seventeenth century, are written according to the forms and genres inherited from classical antiquity: pastoral elegy, epic, Greek tragedy. They are filled proudly with allusions to many great writers of European literature, beginning with Homer. This chapter explains who he was, how he came to write his poems, as well as his radical and polemical prose, and offers brief analyses and assessments.
Making Room for the Individual in Descartes'
Discourse
on
the
Method
Authors: Davies Richard
Published: December 2019

Descartes'
Discourse on the Method
(1637) is one of the founding texts of modern Western philosophy, articulating a process of knowledge gathering that begins with the individual's exercise of reason or “good sense.” Facing down the threat posed by skepticism, Descartes' narrator finds that the first luminous truth he can uncover within himself is that of his own existence. Passing from that to the recognition of the existence of a God who will guarantee the veracity of clear and distinct ideas, the narrator proceeds to lay the foundations of an approach to the natural sciences that will permit him to make discoveries endowed with the certainty characteristic of the truths of geometry. The vision that emerges from this procedure emphasizes a sharp contrast between mind and matter (including one's own body).
Matsuo Bashō Among the Mortals
Authors: Carter Steven D.
Published: December 2019

Matsuo Bashō is now known around the world for his haiku, but in his own time he was primarily associated with the genre of linked verse (haikai renku), a communal form that involved a group of poets composing sequences in the round. It was as a master of that form that he made his living, wearing the robes of a monk but dedicated above all to the Way of poetry. He also traveled widely in central and northern Japan, visiting old disciples, seeking out new ones, and writing poems that later became the basis for travel diaries, most prominentlyOku no hosomichi(The narrow road to the interior). He sought to elevate his genre from a pastime based in wordplay and comic subject matter to a serious form of art, and his emphasis on gentle humor, simplicity, subtlety, and a light rhetorical touch had a lasting impact on Japanese aesthetics.
Evliya Çelebi'sBookofTravels: An Ottoman Experiment in Geographical Encyclopedism
Authors: Kim Sooyong
Published: December 2019

Evliya Çelebi'sBook of Travels(c. 1683) is the most extensive record of the Ottoman imperial realm and beyond in the early modern era. Like much of European travel writing for the period, theTravelsprivileges personal experience, though without adhering to a single paradigm for observing and assessing lands, near and distant. This chapter situates the work in relation to existing genres of knowledge‐gathering and transmission, alongside literary concerns, ultimately arguing that it represents an Ottoman experiment in geographical encyclopedism. In addition, by considering the rhetorical strategies at play, the chapter calls attention to the different cultural frame in which theTravelscomprehended the early modern world.
The Bad Travels of Diderot's Literature
Authors: Piroux Lorraine
Published: December 2019

The corpus of French
philosophe
Denis Diderot has much to say about the specificity of literature as a discourse that travels far although not well. This chapter sheds light on the ways in which Diderot's imaginary exoticization of the origin of narratives played an important role in the emergence, in the eighteenth century, of literature as an aesthetic form. His representation of literature as a language that comes from elsewhere addresses in more ways than one some of the issues debated today by scholars of world literature, from the opening up of literary communication to global scales to the challenges of translation and the politics of transmission. To consider the
philosophe
's lifelong meditation on the exogenous nature of the literary work is to foreground translation and transmission (rather than originality and origins) as one of the forgotten ways by which literature became modern.
Jean de La Fontaine's
Fables
: Poetizing and Problematizing a Genre
Authors: Birberick Anne L.
Published: December 2019

The
Fables
of Jean de La Fontaine have long been regarded as one of the masterpieces of French classicism. In La Fontaine's hands, however, the fable is transformed into a poetic genre in which the relation between apologue and precept becomes problematized. The fabulist does so by infusing irony, ambiguity, and linguistic uncertainty throughout his work as well as calling attention to acts of reading and writing embedded within the texts. There are no definitive moral lessons as readers of the
Fables
must actively negotiate among and between multiple levels of significance generated by the individual texts.
William Shakespeare: Worlds Here, There, and Elsewhere
Authors: Hennessey Katherine
Published: December 2019

This chapter explores William Shakespeare's relationship to world literature, first by examining the fascination his own work evinces with literatures and geographies beyond England's, and the cosmopolitanism and globalization of Elizabethan London. It then explores the paths by which, over the course of centuries, Shakespeare's works have traveled to the farthest corners of the globe, inspiring and provoking authors, artists, and thinkers to translate, adapt, and rewrite his works, or to compose their own. It concludes with a meditation on a 2012 Nigerian production ofThe Winter's Tale, as an illustration of several key features of the phenomenon of “global Shakespeare.”
The Alternative Genius of Lope de Vega
Authors: Thacker Jonathan
Published: December 2019

This chapter examines the figure of Lope de Vega (1562–1635), the most important dramatist of early modern (or Golden Age) Spain. It first identifies some of the classical and Italian influences, common to the Western European tradition, that helped shape Lope's drama and proceeds to explore the extent of his influence beyond Spain's borders during the four centuries that his drama has been performed and published. The chapter examines some of the reasons why, unlike his English contemporary, William Shakespeare, Lope de Vega's drama has struggled to find a stage beyond Spain's borders and in translation, despite the universal nature of the dramatist's themes and his understanding of and engagement with what it means to be human.
Genre and Geography in Ludovico Ariosto'sOrlandoFurioso
Authors: Cavallo Jo Ann
Published: December 2019

This chapter examines Ariosto'sOrlando Furiosoin its literary and historical context, principally in relation to the medieval chivalric tradition and Boiardo'sOrlando Innamorato, the poem Ariosto explicitly sets out to continue. Paying special attention to genre and geography, it focuses in particular on the interplay between features of Carolingian epic and Arthurian Romance as well as on the depiction of characters and places, both imaginary and actual, that represent the world outside Christian Europe. This contextual analysis thus aims to address some perennial issues inherent to the epic genre: Does the poem – whose declared subject matter is love and war – validate interpersonal relations across cultural and geographical boundaries or does it demonize the ethnic and religious other by fashioning collective identities in constant conflict? What are considered to be legitimate uses of violence within theFurioso's fictional universe and in Ariosto's contemporary world?
Rabelais'sGargantuaandPantagruel: The Navel of a World
Authors: Demonet Marie‐Luce
Published: December 2019

Rabelais is the master of the French humanist novel. In his work, he combined the fantastic imagination of oriental legends, of Indo‐European myths, of classical antiquity and Renaissance scholarship, using a vernacular French stuffed with linguistic borrowings and inventions. His curiosity went far beyond his native country, and he played with the art of transforming actual history and places into shareable worlds of fiction.
Colonial Education and Literary Self‐Fashioning in Nineteenth‐Century Bengal: The Career and Legacy of Michael Madhusudan Datta
Authors: Sen Suddhaseel
Published: December 2019

Michael Madhusudan Datta (Dutt), one of the first Indian writers to undergo a Western education, wrote works influenced by both Indian and European literatures, and is generally regarded as one of India's first “modern” writers. Nevertheless, some critics have accused Madhusudan of being too Westernized, while postcolonial critics have generally ignored his work. This chapter examines Madhusudan's life and the influences behind his masterpiece,Meghanadavadha‐kavya(Meghanādavadha‐kāvya), a subversive retelling of the Hindu epicRamayana(Rāmāyaṇa) that departs from both the older epic's religious worldview and the tendency of European epics to side with the political viewpoint of the victors; instead, the poem reinterprets myth to comment on political subjugation as seen from the point of view of the vanquished. Through his wide‐ranging intertextual allusions, Madhusudan opened up Bengali literature to global influences, and his career provides a remarkable example of literary self‐fashioning in the wake of Bengal's colonial encounter with the British.
Gu Hongming's Journey from British Malaya, via Europe, to China and the Confucian Classics
Authors: Groppe Alison M.
Published: December 2019

In his day, Gu Hongming achieved international fame as a “Chinese sage” by producing English translations of the Confucian classics and essays promoting classical Chinese civilization and critiquing modern European and American societies. In Gu's China, however, where most intellectuals prized “learning from the West” and denounced Chinese tradition, he was often dismissed as an eccentric conservative. Meanwhile, though in his essays Gu valorized Chinese philosophy and critiqued the West, he did so by quoting authors like Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, and Matthew Arnold. This chapter highlights Gu's influence from and contributions to world literature by focusing on his globally circulated translations and translation strategies. His literary accomplishments are best understood in light of his experiences growing up as a British colonial subject in Malaya, studying abroad in Scotland and Europe, and only starting to learn Chinese in his twenties as part of a strategic effort to embrace a Chinese identity.
Bridge Essay: Nation: The Mighty Idea and the Novel
Authors: Parr Nora E.H.
Published: December 2019

An organizing structure for time, geography, and people, the nation and the novel organize the world in similar ways. Oppressive and liberating, a goal and a curse, nation and novel are indelibly linked through common histories and development trajectories. The nation and its literary projects have shaped the field of World Literature (the world is – after all, and for now – one of nations), and a shifting concept of “World” is in no small part the result of challenges to geopolitical divisions made through literature. While the nation remains “the most universally legitimate value in the political life of our time,” the way it is thought has been changed by critical readings of its literary texts.
Politics and Idiosyncrasies: The Global Parsing of Alexander Pushkin
Authors: Dickinson Sara
Published: December 2019

Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837), national poet and cult figure, has long been at the center of literature and politics in Russia. In the multi‐ethnic tsarist empire (later Soviet Union and Russian Federation), Pushkin has represented the Russocentric state and its educational system and has been seen as the pinnacle of “national” (imperial, Soviet) tradition and identity. His fame extended abroad along diverse and multiform paths, via personal networks, operatic productions, waves of emigration, and politics. A key product of Soviet “world literature” (mirovaia literatura), Pushkin was forcefully promoted in the years around 1937, the centennial of his death. Many cultures around the world became better acquainted with the Russian national poet as a result, though it is the peculiar openness of the Pushkinian text to individual readings and the dedication of specific readers, often linked in surprising configurations, that guarantees his continuing global relevance.
The Cultural Landscape of Colonial Korea's First Modern Novel,
The
Heartless
(1917)
Authors: Choi Ellie
Published: December 2019

The Heartless
(
Mujŏng,
1917), Korea's first major modern novel, opens to a maelstrom of change in early colonial Seoul when fundamental ideas about the individual, nation, and literature were being overturned. The pioneering work introduces individuals whose newly awakened desires merge into those of the future nation. It sets the groundwork for author Yi Kwangsu's ideas on nation‐building, which he believed had to be manned by self‐awakened youth forging a solid foundation for modern life. Despite this forward‐looking civilizing trajectory, landscapes of the northern home suggest that Yi was ambivalent about the things modernity leaves behind, calling the process “heartless.”
The Heartless
moreover depicts the future of the Korean people without addressing the political situation and suggests that the characters' self‐determination is tenable under colonialism, exposing a vision of nation that is refracted by its social disengagement.
Bridge Essay: Intimate Life and Romanticism
Authors: Mehigan Tim
Published: December 2019

Romanticism elevated the inner life of the human being to importance. The vehicle for that elevation was “poesie,” its object was the heroic journey of the poet in search of inner fulfillment and harmony. This chapter discusses key exponents of Romantic notions, with a focus on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats in the English tradition, Rousseau in the French tradition, and Goethe, Schiller, and Kant in the German tradition. It discusses the importance of the idea of nature and how it was conscripted in the service of disclosure of inner states. Alluding to problems that confronted the Romantic appropriation of nature, the separation between the English and German tradition that arose as a result of these problems is also given importance. The chapter concludes by describing the unusual partnership between literature and philosophy brought forth in the post‐Kantian discussion in Germany – one of Romanticism's most significant and enduring legacies.
Henrik Ibsen: Critique from Within
Authors: Helland Frode
Published: December 2019

Henrik Ibsen, born in Norway in 1828, became a leading European dramatist in his own lifetime, and has since then become part of the global theater repertoire. The plays most often performed internationally are his realist dramas, from
Pillars of Society
(1877) to
When We Dead Awaken
(1899), in addition to
Peer Gynt
(1867). Ibsen's realist plays are modern and still felt as contemporary. This chapter starts by charting some of Ibsen's international success through the database IbsenStage, then delves into the social background and social class central in his plays. It continues with a discussion of the political significance of Ibsen's focus on the bourgeoisie and its intimate sphere, the role of women in his plays, and the new requirements for the actor posed by his characters. In conclusion, the chapter discusses some more complicating issues pertaining to language and the (self‐)critique of art.
The Boy Who Came from a Peach and the Girl with a Bowl on Her Head: The Many Faces of Japanese Fairy Tales
Authors: Nüffer Laura K.
Published: December 2019

Japanese fairy tales (
mukashibanashi
) display a diversity of themes and narrative patterns resisting broad generalization. Much of the Japanese fairy‐tale repertoire is rooted in transregional folkloric traditions, and although continental Asia made the greatest contribution to this repertoire, many Japanese fairy tales have Western cognates. However, Japanese fairy tales are set apart from Western fairy tales by their tolerance of transgressions of the animal–human boundary (epitomized by the motif of
irui kon'in
, or marriage between an animal and a human) and their tendency to conclude with the protagonist returning to his or her original circumstances. The modern Japanese fairy‐tale repertoire includes Western fairy tales imported in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while the oldest Japanese fairy tales can be traced to mythohistorical chronicles from the eighth century. Historical investigation reveals that iconic fairy tales such as “Momotarō” and “Urashimatarō” have transformed significantly over time and lack a stable, singular message.
Charles Dickens: Transnational Responses and Cultural Imaginaries
Authors: Lee Klaudia Hiu Yen
Published: December 2019

In this chapter, I first discuss the rise of interest in Charles Dickens's worldwide presence and relate it to the “global” turn in Dickens scholarship and Victorian studies more generally. I then draw upon existing research on related topics and my own study on the publication and circulation of Dickensian texts in early twentieth‐century China and Hong Kong in order to explore how diverse creative and critical responses to his work in specific sociocultural contexts at particular moments of history contribute to his international stature. It places particular emphasis on the ways in which the realism that Dickens's works purportedly embody – such as his portrayal of the urban experience and his engagement with contemporary social issues – have become a source of imagination and, at times, inspiration for those who confront the question of modernity – in its various manifestations – in their own space and time.
“But Women Feel Just as Men Do”: Gender Rights in Nineteenth‐Century World Literature
Authors: Chavez Julia McCord
Published: December 2019

This chapter highlights thematic threads in nineteenth‐century world literature that suggest a shared global interest in “the Woman Question” and gender equality. It explores gender rights in nineteenth‐century literature from Europe, North and South America, the Arab world, India, Japan, and China, using a telescopic pattern to discuss rights that affected women as individuals, as members of families, and as political entities. The chapter begins with rights relating to personal agency, including educational reform and access to work, then expands one level to consider literary responses to patriarchal family structures that were sanctioned both socially and legally. The frame expands once more to consider women writers' roles in political advocacy and the work of nation building. In keeping with contemporary feminist practices, the chapter closes with a reflection on intersectionality and tensions that emerge in nineteenth‐century literature due to colonial and imperial contexts.
Performing Narratives: Slave Narratives on the World Stage
Authors: Morse Heidi
Published: December 2019

Slave narratives emerged on the world literary stage in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in response to the human rights violations of the transatlantic slave trade. Tracing the trajectory of slave narrative scholarship from questions of authorship, authenticity, and literacy acquisition to the prioritization of transatlantic and hemispheric studies in the wake of Paul Gilroy'sThe Black Atlantic(1993) to the rise of comparative media studies, this chapter offers an introduction to major avenues for reframing slave narratives as world literature. Innovative readings of the narratives of Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Sojourner Truth, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown offer case studies of transatlantic book tours, rhetorical self‐fashioning, and “performing narratives,” or the way that slave narrators paired their autobiographical texts with visual and aural performances of race, gender, and freedom.
Bridge Essay: From Decolonization to Decoloniality
Authors: Singh Amardeep
Published: December 2019

The movements against European colonialism that emerged in the twentieth century in numerous societies around the world led to a diverse set of discourses around decolonization. These are discussed here in three phases: the first phase (from 1900 to 1945) explores the emergence of anticolonial thinking amongst nationalist writers and political figures. The second phase explores decolonization at the level of the nation‐state and narrative form. The final phase considers the post‐1990 turn toward “decoloniality” as a mode of analysis and a concept in world literature.
Aimé Césaire in the Era of Black Lives Matter
Authors: Ekotto Frieda
Published: December 2019

This chapter reads Aimé Césaire's work as a continuation of the struggle for the dignity of black people around the world. As a Francophone philosopher and poet, Césaire is a member of an important global lineage of black intellectuals. Together with James Baldwin, W.E.B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, and Claudia Rankine, Césaire's work offers the historical background needed to understand black lives in the second decade of the twentieth century, and particularly the Black Lives Matter movement. These thinkers first articulated enduring questions about the black condition in the world and established why there will not be peace as long as black lives continue to be crushed and their dignity ignored.
Bridge Essay: Home‐Bodies: Exiles, Migration, and Diaspora in the World Literary Engagement
Authors: Celis Abigail E.
Published: December 2019

This chapter reflects on the qualitative traits that differentiate between lived experiences of exile, migration, and diaspora. The three are typically understood forms of displacement mobility that are experienced by many peoples and cultures and thus provide a common ground for world literary engagement. In that sense, they contribute to the production of world literature while also world‐ing national literatures. I trace how exilic, migratory, and diasporic narratives function as genres in world literature, and consider the critical purchase of the three terms as analytical lenses for the reading of world literature. However, while as genres and as analytical concepts they do provide avenues for investigating transnational practices and mobility, I argue that emplacement and embodiment are equally (in)formative elements of exile, migration, and diaspora.