In this study, Rebecca Suter aims to complicate our understanding of world literature by examining the creative and critical deployment of cultural stereotypes in the early novels of Kazuo Ishiguro. “World literature” has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years: Aamir Mufti called it the result of “one-world thinking,” the legacy of an imperial system of cultural mapping from a unified perspective. Suter views Ishiguro’s fiction as an important alternative to this paradigm. Born in Japan, raised in the United Kingdom, and translated into a broad range of languages, Ishiguro has throughout his career consciously used his multiple cultural positioning to produce texts that look at broad human concerns in a significantly different way. Through a close reading of his early narrative strategies, Suter explains how Ishiguro has been able to create a “two-world literature” that addresses universal human concerns and avoids the pitfalls of the single, Western-centric perspective of “one-world vision.” Setting his first two novels, A Pale View of Hills (1982) and An Artist of the Floating World (1986), in a Japan explicitly used as a metaphor enabled Ishiguro to parody and subvert Western stereotypes about Japan, and by extension challenge the universality of Western values. This subversion was amplified in his third novel, The Remains of the Day (1989), which is perfectly legible through both English and Japanese cultural paradigms. Building on this subversion of stereotypes, Ishiguro’s early work investigates the complex relationship between social conditioning and agency, showing how characters’ behavior is related to their cultural heritage but cannot be reduced to it. This approach lies at the core of the author’s compelling portrayal of human experience in more recent works, such as Never Let Me Go (2005) and The Buried Giant (2015), which earned Ishiguro a global audience and a Nobel Prize. Deprived of the easy explanations of one-world thinking, readers of Ishiguro’s two-world literature are forced to appreciate the complexity of the interrelation of individual and collective identity, personal and historical memory, and influence and agency to gain a more nuanced, “two-world appreciation” of human experience.

Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies. From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification. Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

"The introductions in this anthology are meant to be just that: a basic overview of what students need to know before they begin reading, with topics that students can research further. An open access literature textbook cannot be a history book at the same time, but history is the great companion of literature: The more history students know, the easier it is for them to interpret literature. In an electronic age, with this text available to anyone with computer access around the world, it has never been more necessary to recognize and understand differences among nationalities and cultures. The literature in this anthology is foundational, in the sense that these works influenced the authors who followed them. A word to the instructor: The texts have been chosen with the idea that they can be compared and contrasted, using common themes. Rather than numerous (and therefore often random) choices of texts from various periods, these selected works are meant to make both teaching and learning easier. While cultural expectations are not universal, many of the themes found in these works are."--Open Textbook Library.

This peer-reviewed World Literature I anthology includes introductory text and images before each series of readings. Sections of the text are divided by time period in three parts: the Ancient World, Middle Ages and Renaissance, and then divided into chapters by location. World Literature I and the Compact Anthology of World Literature are similar in format and both intended for World Literature I courses, but these two texts are developed around different curricula.

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World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.