Do the notions of “World Lingua Franca” and “World Literature” now need to be firmly relegated to an imperialist-cum-colonialist past? Or can they be rehabilitated in a practical and equitable way that fully endorses a politics of recognition? For scholars in the field of languages and literatures, this is the central dilemma to be faced in a world that is increasingly globalized. In this book, the possible banes and benefits of globalization are illuminated from many different viewpoints by scholars based in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Oceania. Among their more particular topics of discussion are: language spread, language hegemony, and language conservation; literary canons, literature and identity, and literary anthologies; and the bearing of the new communication technologies on languages and literatures alike. Throughout the book, however, the most frequently explored opposition is between languages or literatures perceived as “major” and others perceived as “minor”, two terms which are sometimes qualitative in connotation, sometimes quantitative, and sometimes both at once, depending on who is using them and with reference to what.

This text takes a wholly new look at a major early twentieth-century Dutch poet and novelist from the perspective of world literature, situating his work in both a national and a world literary context as measured against contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Conrad, Pound, Brecht, Segalen, and Malraux. Exemplifying how an author from a “minor” literature may be a “major” world author, this book considers the debates within World Literature regarding the classification of literatures as ‘major’ and ‘minor’, canon formation within Dutch literature, Slauerhoff's position in the Dutch tradition as well as well as his contribution to world literature, particularly focusing on his East Asian poems, his East Asian novels and stories and his poetry and prose set in Latin America. This book is a key read for scholars and students of comparative literature, world literature, European literature, and Dutch literature. Lucid in style, innovative in approach, surprisingly fresh qua topic, this book opens new horizons for literary studies.

How are modernity, coloniality, and interimperiality entangled? Bridging the humanities and social sciences, Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă provide innovative decolonial perspectives that aim to creolize modernity and the modern world-system. Historical Transylvania, at the intersection of the Habsburg Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, offers the platform for their multi-level reading of the main themes in Liviu Rebreanu's 1920 novel Ion. Topics range from the question of the region's capitalist integration to antisemitism and the enslavement of Roma to multilingualism, gender relations, and religion. Creolizing the Modern develops a comparative method for engaging with areas of the world that have inherited multiple, conflicting imperial and anti-imperial histories.

Translation and World Literature offers a variety of international perspectives on the complex role of translation in the dissemination of literatures around the world. Eleven chapters written by multilingual scholars explore issues and themes as diverse as the geopolitics of translation, cosmopolitanism, changing media environments and transdisciplinarity. This book locates translation firmly within current debates about the transcultural movements of texts and challenges the hegemony of English in world literature. Translation and World Literature is an indispensable resource for students and scholars working in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature and world literature.

The importance of a minor language in the field of world literature Dutch literature is increasingly understood as a network of texts and poetics connected to other languages and literatures through translations and adaptations. In this book, a team of international researchers explores how Dutch literary texts cross linguistic, historical, geophysical, political, religious, and disciplinary borders, and reflects on a wide range of methods for studying these myriad border crossings. As a result, this volume provides insight into the international dissemination of Dutch literature and the position of a smaller, less-translated language within the field of world literature. The title Doing Double Dutch evokes a popular rope-skipping game in which two people turn two long jump ropes in opposite directions while a third person jumps them. A fitting metaphor for how literature circulates internationally: two dynamic spheres, the source culture and the target culture, engage one another in a complex pattern of movement resulting in a new literary work, translation, or adaptation formed somewhere in the middle. Contributors: Chiara Beltrami Gottmer (American International School of Rotterdam), Peter Boot (Huygens ING), Pieter Boulogne (KU Leuven), Elke Brems (KU Leuven), Michel De Dobbeleer (University of Ghent), Caroline de Westenholz (Louis Couperus Museum), Gillis Dorleijn (University of Groningen), Wilken Engelbrecht (Palacký University Olomouc), Veerle Fraeters (University of Antwerp), Maud Gonne (KU Leuven), Christine Hermann (University of Vienna), Peter Kegel (Huygens ING), Tessa Lobbes (Utrecht University), Marijke Meijer Drees (University of Groningen), Reine Meylaerts (KU Leuven), Marco Prandoni (University of Bologna), Marion Prinse (Utrecht University), Orsolya Réthelyi (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Huygens ING), Diana Sanz Roig (Universitat Pompeu Fabra), Rita Schlusemann (Utrecht University), Matthieu Sergier (Université Saint Louis Brussels), Natalia Stachura (Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan), Janek Urbaniak (University of Wrocław), Stéphanie Vanasten (UCL Louvain-la-Neuve), Ton van Kalmthout (Huygens ING), Suzanne van Putten-Brons, Herbert Van Uffelen (University of Vienna), Marc van Zoggel (Huygens ING), Nico Wilterdink (University of Amsterdam).

This collection gives a diversified account of world literature, examining not only the rise of the concept, but also problems such as the relation between the local and the universal, and the tensions between national culture and global ethics. In this context, it focuses on the complex relationship between Chinese literature and world literature, not only in the sense of providing an exemplary case study, but also as an introspection and re-location of Chinese literature itself. The book activates the concept of world literature at a time when it is facing the rising modern day challenges of race, class and culture.

Travelling Ideas in the Long Nineteenth Century is about how ideas travel on the waves of cultural transfer. The volume focuses in particular on the exchange of ideas, knowledge and culture between the Nordic countries and continental Europe. It includes reflections on travelling and transmitting ideas through various forms, and takes a step further in scrutinising how new theories in literary, cultural and historical studies, as well as new methods, are influencing research in the field of cultural transfer and transmission. In the first part of the volume, the authors examine the export and import of ideas through literature in translation, travel letters, international education strategies and the establishment of artists' colonies. Attention is paid to how writers, artists and cultural transmitters used their cross-border mobility in transferring ideas and how they were connected to each other in new contact zones. The second part is dedicated to new research approaches, such as the use of digital instruments, and research on the strategies and politics behind translated literature. Here, translation bibliographies and the bibliographical data of national libraries, which today are often accessible in digital form, come under scrutiny. These sources are valuable objects of study in the mining of translation flows.