Skip to main content Accessibility help

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.

Close cookie message
×
  1. Home
  2. Series
  3. Cambridge Studies in World Literature

World literature is a vital part of twenty-first century critical studies. Globalization, and unprecedented levels of connectivity through communication technologies, force literary scholars to rethink the scale of literary production, and their own critical practices. As an exciting field that engages seriously with the place and function of literary studies in our global era, the study of world literature requires new approaches. Cambridge Studies in World Literature, a new monograph series, is founded on the assumption that world literature is not all literatures of the world nor a canonical set of globally successful literary works. The series will highlight scholarship on literary works that focus on the logics of circulation drawn from multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. While not rejecting the nation as a site of analysis, the series will offer insights into new cartographies - the hemispheric, the oceanic, the transregional, the archipelagic, the multi-lingual local - that better reflect the multi-scalar and spatially dispersed nature of literary production. It will highlight the creative co-existence, flashpoints and intersections of language worlds from both the Global South and the Global North, and multi-world models of literary production and literary criticism that these have generated. It will push against existing historical, methodological and cartographic boundaries, and showcase humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of world scale environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

  • General Editors: Debjani Ganguly, University of Virginia, Francesca Orsini, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Refine search

Refine search

Content type:
Publication date:
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

8 results in Cambridge Studies in World Literature

Five Economies of World Literature
  • Sandor Hites
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    September 2025
    Print publication:
    30 September 2025
  • Five Economies of World Literature is a comprehensive revision of nineteenth-century conceptualizations of 'world literature' in view of their intersections with economic thought. The book demonstrates that with a routinized identification of world literature as the cultural manifestation of modern capitalism, recent discussions have lost sight of an important historical and conceptual dynamic. Based on reinterpretations of the work of Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, Hugó von Meltzl, and Marx, the chapters center on five economic notions (free trade, the gift, central planning, protectionism, and common ownership) that have shaped the theory and praxis of transnational exchange. At a time of profound reconfigurations in global political, cultural, and economic landscapes, this analysis deepens our historical understanding of cross-cultural encounters and also offers a better grasp of many of our current concerns about the globalization of cultural production and consumption.

V. S. Naipaul and World Literature
  • Vijay Mishra
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • V. S. Naipaul is a major and controversial figure in postcolonial and world literature. This book provides a challenging and uncompromisingly honest study that engages with history, genre theory, aesthetics, and global literary culture, with close reference to Naipaul's published and archival material. In his fiction and creative histories, the definition of the modern idea of world literature is informed by the importance of an artistic ordering of perception. Although often expressing ideas that are prejudicial and morally repugnant, there is an honesty in his writings where one finds extraordinary insights into how life is experienced within colonial structures of power. These colonial structures provided no abstract unity to the field of literary expression and ignored vernacular cultures. The book argues that a universal ideology of the aesthetic, transcending time, regions, and languages, provides world literature with a unity which is possible only within a critical universal humanism attuned to heroic readings of texts and cultures.

Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters
  • Baidik Bhattacharya
  • Published online:
    19 January 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, this book argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism
  • Samuel Hodgkin
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature
  • Duncan M. Yoon
  • Published online:
    01 June 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023
  • China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century African Literature unpacks the long-standing complexity of exchanges between Africans and Chinese as far back as the Cold War and beyond. This scope encompasses how China, which emerged as a main engine of the world economy by the end of the twentieth century, has transformed patterns of globalization across the continent. In this ground-breaking work on cultural representations, Duncan M. Yoon examines the controversial symbol of China in African literature. He reads acclaimed authors like Kofi Awoonor, Henri Lopes, and Bessie Head, as well as contemporary writers, including Ufrieda Ho, Kwei Quartey, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Each chapter focuses on a genre such as poetry, detective fiction, memoir, and the novel, drawing out themes like resource extraction, diaspora, gender, and race. Yoon demonstrates how African creative voices grapple with and make meaning out of the possibilities and limitations of globalization in an increasingly multipolar world.

Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry
  • Levi Thompson
  • Published online:
    24 November 2022
    Print publication:
    08 December 2022
  • Re-orienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry is the first book to systematically study the parallel development of modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian. It presents a fresh line of comparative inquiry into minor literatures within the field of world literary studies. Focusing on Arabic-Persian literary exchanges allows readers to better understand the development of modernist poetry in both traditions and in turn challenge Europe's position at the center of literary modernism. The argument contributes to current scholarly efforts to globalize modernist studies by reading Arabic and Persian poetry comparatively within the context of the Cold War to establish the Middle East as a significant participant in wider modernist developments. To illuminate profound connections between Arabic and Persian modernist poetry in both form and content, the book takes up works from key poets including the Iraqis Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and the Iranians Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, and Forough Farrokhzad.

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Sarah M. Quesada
  • Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.

South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Roanne Kantor
  • Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022
  • Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.