Multilingual Literature as World Literature examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures. The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research. First, by looking at how engaging with multilingualism as a mode of reading makes visible the multiple pathways of circulation, including as aesthetics or poetics emerging in the literary world when languages come into contact with each other. Second, by exploring how politics and ethics contribute to shaping multilingual texts at a particular time and place, with a focus on the local as a site for the interrogation of global concerns and a call for diversity. Third, by engaging with translation and untranslatability in order to consider the ways in which ideas and concepts elude capture in one language but must be read comparatively across multiple languages. And finally, by proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.

This carefully curated collection of essays charts interactions between majority languages (including English, French, German, Italian and Japanese) and minority dialects or languages pushed to the margins (including Arabic, Bengali, Esperanto, Neapolitan and Welsh) through a series of case studies of leading modern and contemporary cultural producers. The contributors, who work and study across the globe, extend critical understanding of literary multilingualism to the subjects of migration and the exophonic, self-translation and the aesthetics of interlinguistic bricolage, language death and language perseveration, and power in linguistic hierarchies in (post-)colonial contexts. Their subjects include the authors Julia Alvarez, Elena Ferrante, Jonathan Franzen, Amélie Nothomb, Ali Smith, Yoko Tawada, and Dylan Thomas, the film-maker Ulrike Ottinger, and the anonymous performers of Griko. The volume will be of interest to students of creative writing, literature, translation, and sociolinguistics.

This five-volume work presents the collected papers of the twenty-first congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), which took place at the University of Vienna (Austria) from July 21st to July 27th 2016 and was dedicated to the general topic "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature". The contributions gathered in these volumes explore many of the countless ways in which language shapes not only ?national? literatures and ?world literature?, but also the discipline of comparative literature itself. As a whole, these proceedings highlight the opportunities and the challenges associated with the multilingualism of both the discipline and the objects of its study. Yet they also go beyond reflections on the scholarly language of comparative literature in order to investigate how language functions within diverse literary texts and their contexts. Contributors to this compilation are concerned, amongst other aspects, with the way the language used by different social and ethnic groups feeds into literary texts; with the vocabulary of theoretical and cultural discourses such as gender studies and ecocriticism; and with language in a metaphorical sense, as referring to certain codes, forms, or styles. Moving between the discussion of literature itself and the observation of how literature is being discussed, this collection testifies to the polyglot, diverse, and ever-evolving state of the discipline.

Essays covering a broad range of genres and ranging from the late Ottoman era to contemporary literature open the debate on the place of Turkish literature in the globalized literary world. Explorations of the multilingual cosmopolitanism of the Ottoman literary scene are complemented by examples of cross-generational intertextual encounters. The renowned poet Nâzim Hikmet is studied from a variety of angles, while contemporary and popular writers such as Orhan Pamuk and Elif Safak are contextualized. Turkish Literature as World Literature not only fills a significant lacuna in world literary studies but also draws a composite historical, political, and cultural portrait of Turkey in its relations with the broader world.

Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto is a welcome contribution to the field of modern languages, highlighting the intricate relationship between multilingualism and creativity, and, crucially, reaching beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world.

Literature is often assumed to be monolingual: publishing rights are sold on the basis of linguistic territories and translated books are assumed to move from one “original” language to another. Yet a wide range of contemporary literary works mix and meld two or more languages, incorporating translation into their composition. How are these multilingual works translated, and what are the cultural and political implications of doing so? In Literature in Motion, Ellen Jones offers a new framework for understanding literary multilingualism, emphasizing how authors and translators can use its defamiliarizing and disruptive potential to resist conventions of form and dominant narratives about language and gender. Examining the connection between translation and multilingualism in contemporary literature, she considers its significance for the theory, practice, and publishing of literature in translation. Jones argues that translation does not conflict with multilingual writing’s subversive potential. Instead, we can understand multilingualism and translation as closely intertwined creative strategies through which other forms of textual and conceptual hybridity, fluidity, and disruption are explored. Jones addresses both well-known and understudied writers from across the American hemisphere who explore the spaces between languages as well as genders, genres, and textual versions, reading their work alongside their translations. She focuses on U.S. Latinx authors Susana Chávez-Silverman, Junot Díaz, and Giannina Braschi, who write in different forms of “Spanglish,” as well as the Brazilian writer Wilson Bueno, who combines Portuguese and Spanish, or “Portunhol,” with the indigenous language Guarani, and whose writing is rendered into “Frenglish” by Canadian translator Erín Moure.

"In Babel's Shadow is an ambitious, sophisticated book that addresses crucial, timely issues in the study of life-writing, translation, translingualism, literary theory, and linguistics. Its range is extensive and its erudition and intellectual calisthenies dazzling."---Steven G. Kellman, author of The Translingual Imagination --