Debating World Literature

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of ‘literature’ has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. It takes as its starting point Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, from which it then travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Among its many concerns are the legacies of Goethe’s idea, variable understandings of the term ‘literature’ itself, cross-cultural encounters, the nature of ‘small literatures’, and the cultural politics of literary genres. With contributions from many of the leading voices in the field, Debating World Literature seeks to transcend the pieties and simplifications of polemic in a search for the complexity embodied in the linking of the two terms ‘world’ and ‘literature’.

Christopher Prendergast is Professor of Modern French Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of King’s College Cambridge. He is the co-editor of World Reader, an anthology of world literature.

Benedict Anderson is Aaron L. Binenkorp Professor of International Studies Emeritus at Cornell University. He is editor of the journal Indonesia and author of Java in a Time of Revolution, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia, and the World and Imagined Communities.

Emily Apter is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at New York University. Her published works include The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature and Continental Drift: From National Characters to Subjects.

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is translator and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Metamorphosis, author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory, and Thomas Mann, 1875–1955. He is the recipient of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold.

Franco Moretti teaches English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of Signs Taken for Wonders, The Way of the World and Modern Epic, all from Verso.