bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Identidade e lugar na metafenomenologia da alteridade Payayá
Authors: Lima Jamille Da Silva
Published: December 2019

A relação lugar-identidade apresenta uma ambivalência que vai da celebração à condenação, ganhando novo fôlego após os anos 1990 tanto com a relevância que os movimentos identitários de resistência (étnicos, raciais e de gênero) alcançaram, na luta pelo lugar, enquanto território, quanto na força que o clamor pelo respeito à diferença e pelo reconhecimento do sentido opressor e colonial da identidade receberam, questionando o papel dos processos de territorialização nos conflitos e na negação da diferença que promovem a captura do Outro pelo Mesmo. Deslocamos a questão da relação identidade-diferença para o nexo consciência-lugar, desfazendo esta associação que dá relevo ao sentido frente ao sem-sentido. A prevalência da consciência é compreendida como um dos instrumentos da razão imperialista-colonizadora, eurocêntrica, e por isso é necessário fissurá-la para um outro sentido geográfico de identidade. Mas como significar nossa relação geográfica e sua implicação para a identidade libertando-se das amarras da consciência e dos modelos coloniais de intelecção do ser? Este é o principal questionamento mobilizador do artigo, o qual será enfrentado a partir da experiência com os indígenas Payayá e da interlocução com a filosofia de Emmanuel Lévinas, como metafenomenologia, no sentido de um pensamento descolonial latino-americano.

Abstract

IDENTITY AND PLACE IN THE METAPHENOMENOLOGY OF THE PAYAYÁ’S ALTERITY

The identity-place relationship presents an ambivalence that goes from celebration to condemnation, gaining a new impetus after the 1990s, both with the relevance that identity resistance movements (ethnic, racial and gender) have achieved, fighting for the place – as territory –, as with the strength that crying for respect differences and the oppressive and colonial sense of identity received, questioning the role of the territorialization processes in the conflicts and in the denial of the distinctions that promote the capture of the Other by the Same. We move the question of the identity-difference relationship to the nexus between consciousness-place, undoing this association that gives relevance to sense in the face of the non-sense. The prevalence of consciousness is understood as one of the instruments of the imperialist colonizing reason, Eurocentric, and therefore it is necessary to break it into another geographical sense of identity. But how do we give meaning to our geographical relationship and its implication to identity, freeing ourselves from the bonds of consciousness and the colonial models of the intellection of being? This is the main question that mobilized the paper, which will be faced from the experience with the Payayá natives and the interlocution with the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, as methaphenomenology, toward a Latin American descolonial thinking.
PERCEPÇÃO DO USO DE URINA ENTRE AGRICULTORES FAMILIARES DE SERRINHA-BA
Authors: François Mathurin , Silva Eduardo Henrique Borges Cohim , Orrico Silvio Roberto Magalhães , Santos Maria Auxiliadora Freitas dos
Published: December 2019

O uso de urina humana na agricultura é uma alternativa promissora para reduzir a poluição ambiental e a importação de fertilizantes industriais, melhorar a qualidade do solo e aumentar a produção agrícola, porém, sua aceitação varia em função do tipo de culturas. Este trabalho avaliou a percepção de agricultores familiares do Semiárido a respeito do uso de urina humana na agricultura. Foram entrevistados 210 agricultores, escolhidos aleatoriamente, por meio da aplicação de um questionário, e também apresentadas diferentes amostras com urina pura, urina diluída e compostos de urina. Houve aceitação inicial de urina como fertilizante por 67,7% dos entrevistados que optaram pelo uso em culturas ingeridas cozidas ou sem contato direto com a urina. Como impedimento ao uso, os entrevistados indicaram: risco à saúde (54,3%), nojo (27,1%) e mau cheiro (24,8%). A aceitação inicial de se utilizar a urina caiu para 31,5% quando da apresentação de amostras de urina pura ou diluída, mas alcançou um valor de aceitação de 53,8% para a amostra misturada com cinza, indicando que sua descaracterização pode ser uma estratégia para torná-la mais aceitável.
Bridge Essay: The Ethical Turn
Authors: Clossey Luke
Published: December 2019

Since the eighteenth‐century European Enlightenment, scholars have repeatedly identified an “Axial Age” around 500
bce
in which common ethical values had developed across Eurasia. After a survey of the scholarly debates about the Axial Age, this chapter presents an example story that appears both in the TaNaKH (Hebrew scriptures) and the Buddhist
jataka
(
jātaka
) tales, the “Judgement of Mahosadha/Solomon.” Three literary features distinguish Axial Age texts: imagery serving a pedagogical purpose, verbal irony, and a protagonist most essentially identified with ethical concerns.
Echoes of the Classics in the Voice of Confucius
Authors: Csikszentmihalyi Mark
Published: December 2019

In the 2500 years since a man known as Kongzi taught the classics and advised the rulers of different states, his life story has become intertwined with traditional Chinese culture and its literary canons. Classical literary works like theClassic of Odes, theClassic of Documents, and theRecords of Ritesnot only were said to contain the curriculum that he used, but also provided the norms that newer stories about his actions and conversations were said to express. Confucius, as he became known in the West, embodied these classical ideals and was portrayed as a sage philosopher, a model teacher, a prophetic statesman, a pious family member, and an ideal moral decision‐maker. He has also been criticized as a didactic traditionalist, a champion of favoritism and inequality, and an agent of the forces of the “Landlord Class.” This chapter centers on a fundamental literary dimension of stories about Confucius by looking at the period during which stories about his life were told as means to transform the values and principles of a set of canonical texts known as the classics into narratives.
The Gospel in Ancient Mediterranean Context
Authors: Batten Alicia J.
Published: December 2019

The “gospel” simply meant “good news” in ancient Greek, and it is used by a variety of writers within Mediterranean antiquity. Eventually, some written documents were produced and known as “gospels” within the Christian tradition. These gospels share parallels, both in form and content, with other literatures of the Mediterranean basin. In this respect, we can think of the gospels as ancient world literature. This chapter addresses some of these parallels and provides an introduction to the gospels, especially those found within the New Testament canon. In addition, the chapter points to a couple of areas where the gospels are unusual and differ from those ideas and expectations that were widespread in Mediterranean antiquity.
Augustine'sConfessions: Beyond Aesthetics, Ethics, and Cosmopolitanism
Authors: Pollmann Karla
Published: December 2019

Shortly after his ordination as bishop, Augustine of Hippo (354–430), arguably the most influential early Christian thinker of the Western part of the Roman Empire, wrote theConfessions, a work that narrates his relentless quest for the meaning of life, which for him equates with finding ultimate truth and God. His raw honesty about his own failures that also continue after his final conversion to Christianity, his vivid, passionate style of self‐interrogation within the frame of the cosmic drama of humanity's fall and salvation, and his highly original insights into human psychology, including a psychologized notion of time and memory, have captured the imagination of readers through the centuries. Defying traditional modes of literary categorization, theConfessionshave invited rich responses by philosophers like Jean‐Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jacques Derrida, artists like Giovanni Boccaccio, composers from Johann Adolf Hasse to Louis Andriessen, and film directors like Roberto Rossellini.
Apuleius andThe Golden Ass: Latin Novel, Universal Folktale, or Emblem of Globalized Literature?
Authors: Gély Véronique
Published: December 2019

Apuleius, born in Africa, educated in Greece, is the author of the only novel written in Latin that has survived in its entirety until today. This chapter focuses on its reception in world literatures. It shows its eminent role in the history of the European and then the global novel, paradoxically founded on the philosophical value that Augustine attributed to it. It explains how this philosophical reading extracted the fable of Psyche from the novel, how this fable became the model for the fairy tale, and the basis, from the romantic period onward, for speculations about the universality of the folktale. Finally, it studies the way in which postcolonial literatures solicit both the main character of the novel, Lucius, and the figure of the author, Apuleius, to theorize the globalization of literature and cultural hybridity.
Apocalyptic Literature in the Global Imagination
Authors: DiTommaso Lorenzo
Published: December 2019

Apocalyptic literature is seldom discussed in the context of world literature, and apocalyptic writings are rarely, if ever considered part of its content. This is surprising, since apocalyptic literature is able to cross linguistic, social, and cultural boundaries with ease, while several premodern apocalyptic texts and perhaps twice as many modern ones merit inclusion in the canon. Some apocalyptic works are admitted because of their cultural influence and global readership. Others qualify as world literature by virtue of their literary excellence and ability to speak to the human condition in a way that transcends their original social and cultural contexts.
“Transcending the World” in World Literature: The Upanishads
Authors: Lindquist Steven E.
Published: December 2019

If “world literature” is a type of literary production that is both novel in form and content and enduring in impact and importance, then the Upanishads (Upaniṣads) qualify as one of the most significant early contributions from the Indian subcontinent. The Upanishads (through exposition, narrative, and verse) are the first texts to introduce and explore key ideas in Hindu religious thought, such as asceticism,moksha(mokṣa, “liberation”), and rebirth within the context of exploring the position of the human being in a hierarchically interlinked cosmos. The Upanishads are key historical and literary documents as well as a living literature.
The Imperial Poetics of Ancient Bucolic
Authors: Reed Jay
Published: December 2019

Bucolic, a tradition of ancient Greek and Latin poetry deriving from certain works of Theocritus, emerges in a period of literary experimentation and reconsolidation of the Greek cultural past. The period after Theocritus sees a codification of dialogues about idealized herdsmen, modeled on a subset of his poems; a still later Greek tradition expands the thematic repertory under the same linguistic and metrical features. Vergil brings the type into Latin with an emphasis on the political position of poetry in an increasingly autocratic Rome, and later Roman bucolic poets respond in different ways to those concerns.
The Septuagint as World Literature
Authors: Joosten Jan
Published: December 2019

Three aspects of the Septuagint assign it a place in world literature. First, the Septuagint is arguably the most famous translation in human history; one might say it came to incarnate the idea of translation as such. Second, the Septuagint created a unique form of discourse that proved fruitful into late antiquity and beyond, particularly in Christian literature. Third, some of the non‐translated books in the corpus, such as Judith or Wisdom of Solomon, would on their own justify the label of world literature for the Septuagint.
Sinuhe: A Fugitive from AncientEgypt
Authors: Enmarch Roland
Published: December 2019

The Tale of Sinuhewas written in the Egyptian Middle Kingdom (c. 1975–1640bce). It is the tale of an Egyptian courtier who, in a moment of abject terror during a political crisis, deserts his Egyptian lord, and abandons Egyptian culture and Egypt itself. He travels into Syria‐Palestine, and builds a new life for himself as a tribal leader among foreign peoples, adopting local culture. The vividly told tale is an exciting story of adventure in foreign climes, but it is also a profound reflection on what it means to be an Egyptian, and an examination of the complex (and often incomprehensible) motivations that drive human action. The ancient Egyptians considered this tale to be one of the “classic” literary works of their culture, and read it over a period of at least 750 years.
Homer'sIliadandOdyssey: Poems of Many Turnings
Authors: Martin Richard P.
Published: December 2019

The complex and varied pathways that brought Homeric epic from its beginnings on the coast of Asia Minor to worldwide appreciation involved changes of media (oral transmission to papyrus scrolls to handwritten manuscripts to printed texts and ultimately paperbacks and digital editions), empires (Athenian, Roman, Byzantine), continents, and languages. This chapter traces key stages in the journey of Homer from the eighth centurybceto the twenty‐first centuryce, and asks what features of theIliadandOdysseymay have prepared the poems for globally broad reception.
Sophocles: Greek Poet, World Classic
Authors: Finglass P.J.
Published: December 2019

This chapter examines Sophocles, one of the three famous tragic poets from classical Greece, from the perspective of world literature. It gives a brief account of the context of his life and writings, before investigating the process whereby Sophocles' works grew to be appreciated across so many centuries and so many cultures. It begins by looking at the spread of Sophoclean tragedy across the Greek world, something that began in Sophocles' own day. It then considers the Romans' engagement with Sophocles, including at the funeral games for Julius Caesar, before analyzing the place of Sophocles in the Byzantine Empire, as well as noting early Arab contact with his works via an Arabic translation of Aristotle'sPoetics. Finally, the chapter pursues the story past the coming of the printing press down to the modern world, surveying the engagement withAntigoneand the fragmentary playThe Trackersby translators and producers from a variety of different cultures.
Bridge Essay: From Epic to Lyric
Authors: Konstan David
Published: December 2019

Lyric has been interpreted as the medium or genre in which subjectivity is expressed, in comparison with the objective, third‐person nature of epic, and even as the form in which the modern concept of the “self ” first found expression. It is argued here that the distinctive quality of lyric is that it may be readily performed by almost anyone, whether sung (when set to music) or recited, and allows the performer to become, as it were, the subject of the poem.
Nizami's Resonances in Persianate Literary Cultures and Beyond
Authors: Sharma Sunil
Published: December 2019

The reception of the narrative poems of the medieval Persian poet Nizami (Nizāmī, d. c. 1209) in Persianate societies can be studied through the process of vernacularization. In this context, vernacularization signified the manifestation of cosmopolitan Persian literary practices in local languages, without the vernacular displacing the classical tradition. The verse romances of Nizami in the form of narrative verse (masnavī) were circulated widely in the premodern Persianate world, and through the practices of imitation (naẓīrah;javāb) and translation (tarjamah) influenced the composition of hundreds of response poems. In the modern period, his stories have inspired creative works in many different forms of media. But to a large extent, Nizami's influence, although palpable, has been indirect in world culture.
Hanshan and the Skillful Means of Buddhist Verse
Authors: Rouzer Paul
Published: December 2019

The 300 poems attributed to the Chinese recluse Hanshan (Cold Mountain) have become the most popular representatives of traditional Chinese verse for North American readers since the appearance of Gary Snyder's translations in the 1950s. An investigation into the poems themselves and the history of their reception reveal a complex intermingling of literary and religious factors: a body of poems likely written by a number of poets on Chinese folk themes came to be embraced by Zen monastics and lay believers, who read them allegorically and didactically as the teachings of a bodhisattva. Modern North American enthusiasts, on the other hand, relate his poems to countercultural and environmental movements and continue to see him as a representative of ecopoetic concerns.
Ibn al‐ʿArabi, the Greatest Master: On Knowledge, God, and Sainthood
Authors: Ali Mukhtar H.
Published: December 2019

Muhyiddin Ibn al‐ʿArabi, known as the Greatest Master (al‐Shaykh al‐Akbar) is one of Islam's most influential thinkers and prolific writers. He brought the esoteric dimension of Islam to new heights and created a comprehensive system of mystical thought that has infused virtually every Islamic discipline for the past 700 years. After discussing his influence on Islamic scholarship, this chapter will focus on some of his most important ideas: his theory of knowledge, the nature of Being, the concept of Man, and finally, the hierarchy of spiritual people, namely, the saints who are the heirs to the prophets. In this last aspect, Ibn al‐ʿArabi claimed to have been nominated as the Seal of the Saints, a claim that would endure for centuries without being challenged by any other mystic thereafter, earning him his title, the Greatest Master. This study concludes with a discussion on the finality of Ibn al‐ʿArabi's sainthood which is, in his own doctrine, superseded by the Solitary Ones (al‐afrād), individuals who are beyond the purview of even the Pole of existence (al‐qutb).
“He Has Come, Visible and Hidden”: Jalal al‐Din Rumi's Poetic Presence and Past
Authors: Lynch Matthew B.
Published: December 2019

This chapter describes the life, works, and influence of Jalal al‐Din Rumi (Jalāl al‐Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī), the Persian mystic poet and teacher. Themes of Sufism and mysticism, as well as poetic style and form, are examined alongside sociocultural context. Issues related to hybridity, intertextuality, cultural transfer, and translation are discussed. Rumi is situated within his own community, and alongside other well‐known Persian poets. His collected poems and his main epic work are described on thematic, structural, and formal levels. His reception amongst both Muslim audiences and non‐Muslim European audiences is examined to demonstrate the difference between literary and “spiritual” usage and popularization of his poetry in comparison with the Sufi and courtly audiences where his work was long utilized. Ultimately, a description of the contemporary landscape with regard to Rumi, his writings, and ideas is given.
Meister Eckhart: From Latin Scholasticism toGerman Mysticism
Authors: Dobie Robert J.
Published: December 2019

This chapter explores the key themes, influences, and subsequent reception of the works and thought of one of the most prominent mystical thinkers and theologians of the High Middle Ages, Meister Eckhart. In particular, it looks at how Eckhart, as a “bilingual thinker” in both the scholarly Latin and vernacular German of his day, translated not only verbally but also conceptually medieval High Scholasticism into the inner life of the soul's union with God. Thus, in his writings, the philosophical and theological insights of Scholasticism become dynamic moments in the soul's journey into its inner ground, which it shares with the very divine Godhead itself.
Bridge Essay: Gender and Representation: New Approaches to Medieval Literature
Authors: McGerr Rosemarie
Published: December 2019

Study of the relationship of gender and representation in medieval literature has grown significantly since the 1970s. While current theories, which highlight the socially constructed and unstable nature of gender, subjectivity, and representation, might seem to have few links with medieval cultures, scholars are showing that these approaches are productive tools for analyzing medieval texts. Recent studies have challenged the assumption that medieval texts define gender primarily in binary terms, shown how medieval texts highlight the role of performance in gender and representation, and offered comparative readings that bring attention to the importance of medieval literature in exploring gender and representation in world literature. As a result, we understand that many medieval texts participate in interrogations of gender and representation similar to those in later literatures.
Al‐Khansaʾ: Representing the First‐Person Feminine
Authors: Hammond Marlé
Published: December 2019

The seventh‐century Arabic poet al‐Khansaʾ (al‐Khansāʾ) composed lamentations that simultaneously celebrate patriarchal values and endow the female voice with a formidable subjective agency. This chapter contemplates the construction of such an elegiac voice through the analytical lens of grammatical gender and asks what the specificities of Arabic grammar and al‐Khansaʾ's skillful manipulation of its codes can contribute to universal notions of women's writing. It concludes that the complex rules of gender agreement that characterize Arabic, far from entrapping women in a stifling binary system, enable women to choose between marking their voices as decidedly feminine and leaving them conspicuously unmarked.
Hafez of Shiraz, Constantinople, and
Weltliteratur
Authors: Shamel Mir Shafiq
Published: December 2019

This chapter discusses the formal qualities, intellectual tendencies, and the existential conception of being in Hafez's poetry. It further situates the Diwan of Hafez (
Dīvān‐e Hāfez
), the collected poems (ghazals) of the fourteenth‐century Persian poet Hafez (1320– 1389), in relation to classical Persian poetry and poetics. A brief overview of selected critical approaches to Hafez's poetry illustrates some of the major concerns in Hafez scholarship. Furthermore, it explores the relevance of Hafez's poetry for the emergence of the idea of world literature in the context of the translation of Hafez's poetry into European languages, Goethe's
West‐Eastern Divan
, and the cross‐national dimension of Hafez's poetry today.
The Secular Wisdom ofKalila and Dimna
Authors: Mallette Karla
Published: December 2019

This chapter surveysKalila and Dimna, a work of wisdom literature which traveled across the Eurasian continent, translated into multiple languages, between late antiquity and the early modern era. It considers the scope, range, and aims of the work, arguing thatKalila and Dimnais a secular work which (like many religious writings of the Middle Ages) aims to summarize and teach ethical truths. The chapter summarizes the transmission history of the narrative, from the Sanskrit original, probably written about 300ce, through Arabic, Greek, Latin, and European vernacular versions, to the Italian versions that brought the book into the era of print.
Bridge Essay: Epic and Community: Heroism, Myth, and Memory across Cultures
Authors: Welch Anthony
Published: December 2019

This brief study of epic literature composed between 600 and 1400
ce
traces several patterns of social and cultural transition that shaped heroic fictions in diverse regions around the globe. Nomadic peoples established fixed settlements and developed complex new perspectives on their migratory ancestors. With the spread of literacy in Europe and Asia, oral heroic narratives were written down and refashioned by literate elites. Local clans and kinship networks were amalgamated into larger political or religious blocs, reshaping older models of identity, shifting the axes of ideological conflict, and redefining heroic warfare. A premodern commercial revolution, characterized by long‐distance travel, trade, and intercultural contact, widened the cultural horizons of the old heroic tales to create new forms of literary expression.
A Book of Kings as the King of Books: TheShahnamehof Ferdowsi
Authors: Lewis Franklin D.
Published: December 2019

TheShahnameh(Shāhnāmih,Book of kings) functioned as a foundational text for Persian readers on the Iranian plateau, in Central Asia, and Southwest Asia since shortly after its appearance at the Samanid court in various prose and verse renditions in the tenth century. Majestically versified by Ferdowsi in 1010, the poem spread with the Persian language, Persianate bureaucratic institutions, and Persian/Near Eastern kingship into South Asia and Anatolia from its matrix in Khorasan (Marv, Bukhara, Samarqand, Balkh, and Tus, in what is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, and Iran) to become not only a regional but a global text by the nineteenth century. Although its international appeal waned somewhat in the early twentieth century because of certain political developments, with new translations it has once again taken its place as a work of world literature with enduring themes, elegantly and concisely expressed, with great psychological depth and insight, that repays reading and rereading.
The Sundiata Epic and the Global Literary Imaginary
Authors: Tsaaior James Tar
Published: December 2019

In the Senegambia region of West Africa exists the Sundiata Epic, perhaps the most famous, significant, and valued piece of folklore. The epic narrativizes the illustrious life and legendary career/achievements of Sundiata, the founder/emperor of the old Mali Empire. There are as many versions as there are raconteurs of the epic. Despite the differences, the common thematic center is that Sundiata established a vast empire from the ruins of Ghana Empire in the thirteenth century that stretched from the west of the Niger River to the Atlantic Coast. The epic signals the organic link between history and literature, tradition and continuity as it anticipates the emergence of a new world order with the advent of an inchoate Arabic culture. The literary assumptions of the epic are obvious from the creativity and ingenuity of the griots who have kept it alive as a unique contribution to world literature through their telling and re‐telling rites.
Martin Luther, Literature, and the Enlightenment
Authors: Cummings Brian
Published: December 2019

Martin Luther (1483–1546) appears to divide the worlds of literature and religion. Since the Enlightenment, literature has been taken to be a secular institution, like science and the visual arts. The idea is summed up in Friedrich Nietzsche's aphorism, “God is dead!” This chapter argues for a different interpretation. Luther, by mastering the early development of print culture, and by insisting (via Erasmus and humanism) on a philological mode of interpreting the Bible as the basis for religious faith, creates a space for a literary culture, rather than closes it off. The Enlightenment (especially Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) sometimes admires Luther. In this way, the chapter sees Luther as an ambivalent figure for a global literary history. The power of his writing, the acuteness of his literary criticism, and the radical edge of his personality show the limitations of the “secularization thesis.”
The Knight‐Errant and the Good Fellow in Chinese Narrative:Water Marginand theXia(Hero) Tradition
Authors: Altenburger Roland
Published: December 2019

This chapter describes two contrasting conceptions of heroes in premodern Chinese narrative literature: the knight‐errant (xia) type of avenger, and the good fellow (haohan) type of bandit. Both of these are exemplified by a novel,Heroic Sons and Daughters(Ernü yingxiong zhuan, 1878), andWater Margin(Shuihu zhuan, c. 1550), respectively. While the knight‐errant type emerges as a solitary and mysterious individual, theWater Marginbandits are characterized by a homosocial desire to bond with other good fellows. WhileWater Margin, being the first vernacular Chinese novel, is a milestone in literary history and one of the great, classic hero narratives of China,Heroic Sons and Daughtersis remembered first of all for its striking representation of a martial heroine as a case of gender reversal. Chinese hero narratives share with medieval European narratives the important motif of the journey, or quest.
A Model of Relational Individuality: Montaigne
Authors: Hoffmann George
Published: December 2019

Montaigne does not confirm Burckhardt's thesis regarding the rise of the individual in the Renaissance. Instead he leads one to question whether early modern subjectivities correspond to modern senses of selfhood. His recursive, self‐regulative, and relational practices of individuality provide a more open‐ended and outward‐facing model, one suited to today's demand for balancing claims to autonomy with awareness of historical context. Essentially satiric in genre, Montaigne's self‐writing deploys a spectrum of images and analogies. He explains his project as portraiture, self‐testing, a quest for sincerity, self‐exhibition, memorial reanimation, self‐discipline, mental procreation, and a natural history of humankind.
Literati and Peddlers: The Commedia dell'Arte and the German Idea of
Weltliteratur
Authors: Henke Robert
Published: December 2019

The commedia dell'arte exemplifies some salient principles of “world literature,” especially when viewed through Goethe's and Marx/Engels's early ideas on the concept. Before Italy was a political nation, the commedia dell'arte presented the notion of “Italian theater” to a European audience: a culturally “national” entity well before the Risorgimento. If Goethe and Marx/Engels compare the circulation of literary texts on a global stage with the flow of material commodities, the persistently material and commercial commedia dell'arte nicely evokes
Weltliteratur
in its original formulation. Transnationally mobile as soon as it emerged in the mid‐sixteenth century, the commedia dell'arte has also become metonymic for the idea of the traveling troupe: an idea that has moved through space and time in particularly interesting ways.
Staging France's Classical Theater World and Discovering Its Limits
Authors: Longino Michèle
Published: December 2019

This chapter provides an overview of the important role of seventeenth‐century French classical theater in representing and engaging with other cultures, mainly of the Levant, while at the same time submitting them, by fitting them into the language of French alexandrine verse, to the aesthetic conditions of their world. The conditions of contact that facilitated and/or impeded understanding of the Mediterranean world beyond French frontiers are well articulated in these plays, which stage the stand‐off between East and West that characterized relations at the time of the production of the plays. The theatergoers were enjoined to embrace attitudes that the actions and discourses of the plays encouraged, and so the theater contributed in forming a population indoctrinated in attitudes conducive to French domination of the world. It is telling that when we consider this topic under the rubric “world literature,” we see clearly just how provincial and small the vision of France's world was.
A Lash for the World: Jonathan Swift'sGulliver's Travels
Authors: Higgins Ian
Published: December 2019

Gulliver's Travelsis a landmark in world literature. Swift intended the work for the world and for all periods and the satire has a timelessness that makes it always contemporary. It has an enduring international multimedia presence. A mock travel book in a tradition of satirical imaginary voyages,Gulliver's Travelsis confected from multiple genres and draws upon world literature, especially the literature of the classical world. What it isn't is a novel. Modern novelistic readings have led to a softening of what is an unpalatable hardcore misanthropic satire. Swift's work has multiple targets but a principal target is the reader. Aspects of Swift's satire are politically extremist. The work contains a famous denunciation of colonialism and provides an early astringent critique of a nascent global capitalism. A sensation and scandal at the time of its publication, the satire still arrests attention today.
Voltaire: The Orient of the Enlightenment
Authors: Cronk Nicholas
Published: December 2019

As a literary celebrity, Voltaire has always been a key figure in world literature, enjoying a global readership. In his own day, he had an insatiable curiosity about the literature of other cultures, European and non‐European, which he explored as part of his broader project to write a “universal” history that would describe more than just the Christian world and would encompass the progress of human culture across the globe. He has a particular interest in the Orient (in the broad sense, embracing Turkey, Persia, China, and India) and, as a biblical critic and Enlightenment philosopher, he is at pains to emphasize the “Oriental,” i.e. Hebrew, credentials of the Old Testament, which he seeks to rank alongside other mythological narratives surviving from the ancient world. The Orient thus becomes a key element in his polemical arsenal.
Bridge Essay: The Novel: Or, the Power and Functions of Fictionality
Authors: Phelan James
Published: December 2019

Noting that the novel has never been a single form, this chapter seeks to identify the common characteristics of the genre and the reasons why they should give rise to such an important cultural form. Those characteristics are fictionality, a certain magnitude, and writing, and the most important of these is fictionality, that is, intentionally communicated invention in discourse. In addition to developments in history and culture, humans' ability to deploy fictionality within non‐fictional discourses made possible the emergence and evolution of the novel, as a genre that employs invention to intervene indirectly in the actual world. Attending to fictionality and to the schema that divides novelistic representation and readerly interest into mimetic, thematic, and synthetic components allows us to recognize the distinctive quality of novels that are representations of action as well as the great diversity of novelistic forms.
Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe
Authors: Fallon Ann Marie
Published: December 2019

Robinson Crusoe
is often cited as the first novel in the English language. But Defoe's novel can better be understood as part of an early tradition of world literature that reflects a rapidly changing global economy in the early eighteenth century. In a tradition of long prose fiction, Defoe cites and revises a global literary experience for a local English market. He draws upon a newly emergent London publishing culture that offers new readers translations of stories from around the world. The appeal of the novel quickly outpaces the national and linguistic boundary of England and offers writers and readers across the globe a common experience of both the isolation of modernity and the unexpected connections.
Philology Everywhere: World Literature and Ahmad Faris al‐Shidyaq'sLeg Over Leg
Authors: Sacks Jeffrey
Published: December 2019

This chapter presents a reading of the main literary work of the nineteenth century, by the Arabic‐language writer and polymath Ahmad Faris al‐Shidyaq (Aḥmad Fāris al‐Shidyāq),Leg Over Leg(al‐Sāq ʿalā al‐sāq fī mā huwwa al‐Fāriyāq). It considers this text in relation to recent debates on world literature (David Damrosch, Emily Apter, Pheng Cheah, Aamir R. Mufti), and it relates these debates, andLeg Over Leg, to the discipline and practice of philology, understood as a language event, and a form of colonial, linguistic violence, with ongoing effects in the literatures and literary institutions of the colonized. It considersLeg Over Legin relation to broader trends in the Arabic nineteenth century, and the new conceptualization of literature,adab, which emerged during this period, as it introduces several basic terms in two related fields of study: nineteenth‐century Arabic and World Literature Studies.
A Persisting Unease: Joseph Conrad's (Post)Colonial Fictions
Authors: Simmons Allan H.
Published: December 2019

This chapter will address Conrad's place as a world writer by bringing his life and his art into correspondence. First, the chapter will discuss Conrad's background, identifying the formative influences that equipped him to write the colonial fictions that made him a great commentator on empire; then, it examines two representative samples of Conrad's fiction, one set in Borneo and one in Africa, to illustrate how they interrogate colonialism by attending to the voices of the world they describe; and, finally, the chapter considers Conrad's enduring influence upon world literature.
Bridge Essay: Literary Translation in the Modern World
Authors: Ortabasi Melek
Published: December 2019

As the main process by which literature travels beyond its initial linguistic and cultural context, translation is unavoidably at the center of any discussion of world literature. This chapter offers a starting point for thinking about the complex and capacious relationship between translation and world literature, particularly in the modern world. Three subsections present crucial aspects of this relationship. The first section offers a snapshot of the ways in which our developing awareness of translation's importance continues to shape our conceptions of “world literature.” The next section presents diverse perspectives on the historical roles of translation after about 1700, when the rise of empires in conjunction with the formation of modern nation‐states began to set the political tone in many parts of the world. Finally, we turn our attention to the ethical and aesthetic concerns that have shaped the discourse on production and consumption of literary translations.
On Pain and Untranslatability in the Literary World of Rifaʿa al‐Tahtawi
Authors: El‐Ariss Tarek
Published: December 2019

Rifaʿa al‐Tahtawi's (Rifāʿa al‐Ṭahṭāwī's) trip to Paris from 1826 to 1831 launched a modern literary genre and opened European culture and politics to a mass Ottoman audience. Comparative frameworks that theorized the development of modern Arabic literature often centered on al‐Tahtawi's work, analyzing his translation and configuration of European culture in relation to the Arab‐Islamic tradition. In this chapter I explore the untranslatable in al‐Tahtawi's travel narrative,
Imam in Paris
, focusing on specific encounters in France and the physical symptoms (blindness, collapse, visual dismemberment) they generated. I read al‐Tahtawi's collapse as both affective breakdown and as opening to other literary and temporal dimensions. Specifically, I argue that these instances of collapse of forms of transactionality are necessary for comparative and world literary readings of al‐Tahtawi. The untranslatable both as break with representation and the untranslatable as narrative dissonance situates al‐Tahtawi's work at the center of debates about world literature and comparative literature.
Jurji Zaydan: Avatar of the Modern Revitalization and Worlding of Arabic Literature
Authors: Rastegar Kamran
Published: December 2019

This chapter provides an overview of the significance of Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914) as a figure of the ArabNahda(“renaissance”) and more broadly as both theorist of and contributor to the position of Arabic literature within what is increasingly termed “world literature.” In particular, it is argued that Zaydan'sriwayat(“historical novels”) are in need of a new scholarly assessment. A World Literature approach to Zaydan's literary work may well serve to undo the harsh assessment often meted to hisriwayat, placing them into new conversations and comparisons outside of the limiting framework of the nineteenth‐century European novel.
Jane Austen on the Global Stage
Authors: Fraiman Susan
Published: December 2019

Jane Austen is known for depicting intimate relationships within a narrow, domestic compass. Recent critics have, however, demonstrated her engagement with a wide range of topical issues: the French Revolution and Enlightenment feminism; the status of the British navy and British imperialism; life inflected by the Napoleonic Wars. Beyond this worldliness in her own time, Austen's novels have gone on to develop a global fan base comparable to Shakespeare's. My reading of a 1964 musical version ofPride and Prejudiceissued in Johannesburg, South Africa, illustrates the exceptional portability of her concerns. Even more, it shows the retooling of her work to address new circumstances – here, to reflect the apprehensions of Anglophone whites during a particularly repressive decade of the apartheid era.
Leo Tolstoy: Toward an Emotionally Infectious World Literature
Authors: Foster John Burt
Published: December 2019

War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina
are often celebrated as world classics; but in
What Is Art?
, where Tolstoy explained his own position on world literature, he rejected both works as “bad art.” This chapter examines both his key criterion of emotional infectiousness and some of the unspoken assumptions behind his self‐critique, as well as the controversy over his failure to receive the first Nobel Prize in Literature. Since Tolstoy exaggerates the weaknesses of his long fictions, this chapter assesses their strengths in light of his own standards and of their affinities with the literature of intimate life, while taking account of genre terms like epic, fable, and the Russian categories of
roman
and
povest'
. Also considered are several of Tolstoy's longer short fictions, like “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” and
Hadji Murat
, and the ways that his view of world literature compares with Goethe's better‐known idea of
Weltliteratur
.
George Eliot's Impact as Novelist and Critic on World Literature
Authors: Rignall John
Published: December 2019

With her knowledge of classical and modern languages, George Eliot ranged widely across European literature as an essayist and critic before she turned to fiction, and, with her translations and her essays on Goethe and Heine, she was an important mediator of German literature and thought to the English‐speaking world. Committed to realism, her fiction focuses mainly on provincial England but reaches out to a wider world through the discourse of the narrator and allusions to foreign literature.Middlemarchharks back to Cervantes and belongs withMadame BovaryandAnna Kareninaas a great realist novel exploring the predicament of woman.Daniel Derondaranges more widely by exploring Jewish life and culture and a cosmopolitan society in the age of imperialism in ways that anticipate modernism. Widely translated, Eliot has attained a world readership and made her mark on later writers such as Proust.
Resignation Open Eyed: On the NovelRickshaw Boyby Lao She
Authors: Moran Thomas
Published: December 2019

Shu Qingchun (1899–1966), pen name Lao She, is a canonical modern Chinese writer. He was a literary craftsman and a student of world literature influenced by Joseph Conrad. His 1939 novelLuotuo Xiangzi(Camel Xiangzi), translated asRickshaw Boy(2010), is a landmark work of modern Chinese literature and a contribution to the genre of world literature about laborers. It is sometimes read as a critique of individualism and call for collective action, but in the creation of its eponymous protagonist, it is also a defense of the importance of the individual. It is a resigned but masterfully written study of the misery of the urban working poor, not an activist prescription for their liberation, which drew criticism from left‐wing critics in China. The history of the translations ofRickshaw Boyilluminates both the promise and the pitfalls of knowing world literature only through the English language.
World Literature, World War: Revisiting Tayeb Salih's
Season of Migration to the North
Authors: Tageldin Shaden M.
Published: December 2019

Readings of Tayeb Salih's
Season of Migration to the North
privilege the Sudanese novel's intertextuality with Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
. Largely ignored is the English poem that Mustafa Saʿeed,
Season
's central figure, recites one night, unleashing
Season
's core narrative. Yet that poem – Ford Madox Hueffer's
Antwerp
, which eulogizes Belgium's resistance to the Germans during World War I – upends
Season
's economies of race, history, and language. Hueffer's Belgian children and mothers, awaiting men who never return, evoke not their colonizing compatriots in the Congo but Mustafa and his mother in the Sudan, shadowed by a father and husband who dies in the service of British colonialism. Further, Mustafa's recitation of
Antwerp
recasts as mirror‐images English poetry and Arab‐African orature/literature. If world literature is born of world war,
Season
asks, can Arabic and other African and Asian languages overcome the hegemony of English and re‐dictate world literature anew?
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o: Networks, Literary Activism, and the Production of World Literature
Authors: Wallis Kate
Published: December 2019

This chapter explores Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's significance in world literature through the frame of publishers' networks and literary activism, and argues for the ways in which his work has redefined ideas of “world literary space.” The chapter opens by reading the networks and structures of value made visible through the Nairobi launch ofPetals of Blood– Ngũgĩ's fourth novel published in Heinemann's African Writers Series and his last written in English. Leading on from this, it places Ngũgĩ's critical interventions on world literature, in essay collectionsMoving the Centre: The Struggle for Cultural Freedoms(1993) andGlobalectics: Theory and the Politics of Knowing(2014), into dialogue with his own Africa‐centered publishing relationships and trajectories. Ultimately, the chapter draws attention to Ngũgĩ's crucial work – visible through his literary production, critical interventions and publishing decisions – in “moving the centre” of world literature away from the West.
Julio Cortázar: Between Aesthetics and Politics: The Travails of a Literary Traveler
Authors: Russek Dan
Published: December 2019

This chapter covers the life and work of Argentine writer Julio Cortázar (1914–1984), including his contributions to the literature of the fantastic, his translations of English and French letters into Spanish, and his role as a cultural mediator between Latin America and Europe. It highlights the importance of Paris, where Cortázar spent three decades, on his writings, the tensions between his early aesthetics and his later embrace of leftist politics, and his travels. It also discusses the cosmopolitan nature of his 1963 magnum opus,Rayuela(Hopscotch), a crucial work of the Boom of Latin American narrative fiction during the 1960s. The chapter charts the itinerary that made Cortázar a figure in postmodern literature and assesses his place in the international Republic of Letters.
R.K. Narayan: The Elusive World of Malgudi
Authors: Grene Nicholas
Published: December 2019

The distinctiveness of R.K. Narayan's contribution to world literature is defined by the capacity of his fiction to provide “detached engagement with worlds beyond our own time and place.” Four of his best novels,
Mr Sampath – The Printer of Malgudi
,
The Financial Expert
,
The Guide
, and
The Man‐Eater of Malgudi
, all set in an imagined Malgudi, illustrate a distinctive India, strange yet recognizably familiar, embedding Hindu myth and fable in a secular modern society.
Ralph Ellison'sInvisible Man: “To Become One, and Yet Many”
Authors: Hill Lena M.
Published: December 2019

InInvisible Man, Ralph Ellison engages writers from around the world to contextualize the fictional experience of an individual African American man. This chapter analyzes Ellison's canonical work and places it in conversation with his essays, letters, and other fiction to affirm its place as a modern masterpiece of world literature. In examining the protagonist's recognition that he must probe his cultural history to understand his position as a US citizen, this chapter focuses on Ellison's use of violence in the novel. Ultimately, this study argues that withInvisible ManEllison succeeds in translating the black American experience into a universal template for self‐discovery.