Tensions in World Literature

New Publication
Tensions in World Literature: Between the Local and the Universal
Editor: Weigui Fang
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

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.

Introduction: What Is World Literature?
Fang Weigui

1 Comparative Literature and World Literature: From Goethe to Globalization
Bernard Franco
2 The Location of World Literature
Galin Tihanov
3 Frames for World Literature
David Damrosch
4 World Literature and the Encounter with the Other: A Means or a Menace?
William Franke
5 Some Remarks on the Concept of World Literature After 2000
Marián Gálik
6 World Literature, Canon, and Literary Criticism
Zhang Longxi
7 Four Perspectives on World Literature: Reader, Producer, Text and System
Matthias Freise
8 A World of Translation
Philippe Ratte
9 World Literature in Graphic Novels and Graphic Novels as World Literature
Monika Schmitz-Emans
10 Experiments in Cultural Connectivity: Early Twentieth-Century German-Jewish Thought Meets the Daodejing
Peter Fenves
11 Ideographic Myth and Misconceptions about Chinese Poetic Art
Cai Zongqi
12 Chinese Literature as Part of World Literature
Karl-Heinz Pohl
13 How to Become World Literature: Chinese Literature’s Aspiration and Way to “Step into the World”
Liu Hongtao
14 World Literature from and in China
Wolfgang Kubin

Editor: Dr.Weigui Fang is a Distinguished Professor at the School of Chinese Language and Literature, Beijing Normal University, China. He is “Changjiang Scholar” and the Director of the Center for Literature and the History of Ideas at BNU. Before BNU, he taught at University of Trier, University of Göttingen, and University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. As an internationally acclaimed comparatist, his research is focused on Comparative Literature, modern Chinese culture, and literature, History of Concepts, and Sociology of Literature.

Posted by: Xuefeng Feng <fengxf@utexas.edu>

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *