This book argues that the Anglophone novel in the twentieth century is, in fact, always multilingual. Rooting its analysis in modern Europe and the Caribbean, it recognises that monolingualism, not multilingualism, is a historical and global rarity, and argues that this fact must inform our study of the novel, even when it remains notionally Anglophone. Drawing principally upon four authors – Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris and Junot Díaz – this study argues that a close engagement with the novel reveals a series of ways to apprehend, depict and theorise various kinds of language diversity. In so doing, it reveals the presence of the multilingual as a powerful shaping force for the direction of the novel from 1900 to the present day which cuts across and complicates current understandings of modernist, postcolonial and global literatures.

This book examines the relation between geographic and linguistic border crossings in twentieth-century world literature. Exploring the dynamic from a comparative and translingual perspective, this volume reveals differing literary strategies for responding to exile and argues for the crucial role of exile in understanding writing of the period.

This book explores multilingualism as an imaginative articulation of the experience of modernity in twentieth-century Spanish and American literature. It argues that while individual multilingual practices are highly singular, literary multilingualism exceeds the conventional bounds of modernism to become emblematic of the modern age. The book explores the confluence of multilingualism and modernity in the theme of barbarism, examining the significance of this theme to the relationship between language and modernity in the Spanish-speaking world, and the work of five authors in particular. These authors – Ramón del Valle-Inclán, Ernest Hemingway, José María Arguedas, Jorge Semprún and Juan Goytisolo – explore the stylistic and conceptual potential of the interaction between languages, including Spanish, French, English, Galician, Quechua and Arabic, their work reflecting the eclecticism of literary multilingualism while revealing its significance as a mode of response to modernity.

The disparagement of multilingualism is a European development of the 18th and 19th centuries in which one national language and national literature were advocated, established and institutionalised. Multilingual writers made use of the creative potential of several languages even then. However, they often adapted to an increasingly monolingual book market, which made their individual multilingualism invisible. This is evident in literary historiography which established a monolingual national canon. Researching hidden multilingualism is often difficult: since multilingual texts by multilingual writers were often not published or were published in a monolingual version, sources are scarce. Literary histories of the time often do not mention multilingualism. Furthermore, many multilingual writers were members of minority groups (women, Jewish, Non-European) and thus often neglected. The volume offers methods and theories to systematically approach this hidden material, as well as case studies on authors and national literatures in a multilingual context. It thus contributes to the restructuring of a multilingual transnational literary history that is applicable to different philologies.

What if our notions of the nation as a site of belonging, the home as a safe place, or the mother tongue as a means to fluent comprehension did not apply? What if fluency were a hindrance, whilst our differences and contradictions held the keys to radical new ways of knowing? Taking inspiration from the practice of language learning and translation, this book explores the extraordinary creative possibilities, politics, and ethics of adopting a multilingual approach to reading. Its case study, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), is a text in equal measures exhilarating and exasperating: an unhinged portrait of European modernist debates on transculturalism and globalisation, here considered on the backdrop of current discourses on migration, race, gender, and neurodiversity. This book offers a fresh perspective on the illuminating, if perplexing, work of a beloved European modernist, whilst posing questions far beyond Joyce: on negotiating difference in an increasingly globalised world; on braving the difficulty of relating across languages and cultures; and ultimately on imagining possible futures where multilingual literature can empower us to read, relate, and conceptualise differently.

The original (1985) edition of this work attempted to cover the main lines of development of phonological theory from the end of the 19th century through the early 1980s. Much work of importance, both theoretical and historiographic, has appeared in subsequent years, and the present edition tries to bring the story up to the end of the 20th century, as the title promised. This has involved an overall editing of the text, in the process correcting some errors of fact and interpretation, as well as the addition of new material and many new references.

Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present - and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts - fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.