Synopsis
This open access book explores literary works and practices – always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations – in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures. These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions – including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific – are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.
About the Authors
Bo G. Ekelund is Associate Professor of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. His articles within the field of the sociology of literature have been published in Poetics, Novel, Ariel, The International Fiction Review and other journals. He is currently working on a geometric study of the construction of fictional space in 32 Caribbean novels.
Adnan Mahmutovic is a Bosnian-Swedish writer and Associate Professor of English at Stockholm University, Sweden. His major academic work includes Ways of Being Free: Authenticity and Community in Works by Rushdie, Ondaatje and Okri (2012), Visions of the Future in Comics (2018) and The Craft of Editing (2019). His major creative work includes Thinner than a Hair (2010), How to Fare Well and Stay Fair (2012), and At the Feet of Mothers (2020).
Helena Wulff is Professor of Social Anthropology at Stockholm University, Sweden. Her research is in literary anthropology, currently focused on migrant writing in Sweden. Her publications include 11 books and (co)edited volumes, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. Among her publications are The Anthropologist as Writer: Genres and Contexts in the Twenty-First Century (2017) and Rhythms of Writing: An Anthropology of Irish Literature (Bloomsbury, 2019).
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