We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 November 2022
Abstract
This Foreword explores the interplay of world history and world literature in India after World History. The editor guides eight authors in discussing four key issues. In critique of global humanities theory, the book shows the advance of literary scholars in global theory, balanced by inclusive empirical historical studies. World-making is advanced as a technique for global interpretation; past and present examples clarify the concept and its value. Third, the global debate over Amitav Ghosh's Ibis trilogy demonstrates how a single work can focus wide debate. And the “global,” a twenty-first-century perspective, is shown to be balanced by an emerging “planetary” perspective. The book links these interpretive issues through well-chosen “meeting points” in world literature and history, at which varying perspectives contend in debate. In sum, the Foreword presents the work as opening a path for grappling with multiple perspectives in understanding the global and the planetary.
Keywords: World literature; world history; keywords; theory; world-making; Ibis trilogy; meeting points; global; planetary
Literature and history, the two largest fields in the humanities, now give significant attention to worldwide dimensions of their disciplines. This volume, with five essays by world literary scholars and five by world/global historians, explores issues that criss-cross the contested terrain of globalization. Historian Neilesh Bose, the leader in assembling this productive exchange, saw the benefits in focusing the book on India—long a nexus of global discourse and institutional diversity— without abandoning the subcontinent's heritage of area-studies analysis. The result brings a fresh look at the global, with a wealth of materials.
The volume draws on two centuries of Indian writing in global literature and history—a nexus of global thought from numerous perspectives. For scholars in India as elsewhere, a core concern within the two expanding disciplines is contemporary globalization, with its social and environmental transformations and crises. At the same time, authors and critics in both fields are expanding the scope of their work along temporal, spatial, and topical axes. Attention to topics beyond elite dominance creates space for such issues as the lives of commoners, the complexities of gender, the significance of ancient antecedents, assumptions on human agency, and the limits of nature. Each of the resulting perspectives necessarily entails challenges to the priorities of others, so that a growing range of issues now contends for space in the understanding of the global.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.
