Re-mapping World Literature : Writing, Book Markets and Epistemologies Between Latin America and the Global South / Escrituras, Mercados Y Epistemologías Entre América Latina Y El Sur Global

How can we talk about World Literature if we do not actually examine the world as a whole? Research on World Literature commonly focuses on the dynamics of a western center and a southern periphery, ignoring the fact that numerous literary relationships exist beyond these established constellations of thinking and reading within the Global South. __Re-Mapping World Literature__ suggests a different approach that aims to investigate new navigational tools that extend beyond the known poles and meridians of current literary maps. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South which thus far have received scant attention. The contributions to this volume, from renowned scholars in the fields of World and Latin American literatures, assess travelling aesthetics and genres, processes of translation and circulation of literary works, as well as the complex epistemological entanglements and shared worldviews between Latin America, Africa and Asia. A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a must-read for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature. The concept at issue in this book is Weltliteratur, or World Literature. Theoretical frameworks usually view the now-famous epistolary exchange between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and the young Johann Peter Eckermann as the true foundation of the concept, (though earlier promoters of similar ideas, such as August Wilhelm Schlegel can be cited)1. Goethe wrote this to Eckermann in a well-known letter in 1827: ?National literature is now a rather unmeaning term; the epoch of World Literature is at hand, and everyone must strive to hasten its approach?2. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as well as Richard Moulton and Erich Auerbach, among many others, also all contributed to the category from their respective historical moments and theoretical perspectives. Marx and Engels, of course, took a materialist point of view that emphasized the expansion of the capitalist economic project and its progressive conquest of the world as a market. Richard Moulton and Erich Auerbach, on the other hand, came from a humanistic philological perspective that, as Jérôme David has put it in his reflections on the different genealogies of World Literature, ?derived from the anxious preoccupation with what the literary works mean? (2013: 14) and focused very early on the problems of translation and canonization that would become crucial for the conceptual debates of our time

How can we talk about World Literature if we do not actually examine the world as a whole? Research on World Literature commonly focuses on the dynamics of a western center and a southern periphery, ignoring the fact that numerous literary relationships exist beyond these established constellations of thinking and reading within the Global South.

Re-Mapping World Literature suggests a different approach that aims to investigate new navigational tools that extend beyond the known poles and meridians of current literary maps. Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South which thus far have received scant attention. The contributions to this volume, from renowned scholars in the fields of World and Latin American literatures, assess travelling aesthetics and genres, processes of translation and circulation of literary works, as well as the complex epistemological entanglements and shared worldviews between Latin America, Africa and Asia.

A timely book that embraces highly innovative perspectives, it will be a must-read for all scholars involved in the field of the global dimensions of literature.

"This book aims to modify the focus of common center-periphery dynamics of research on World Literature: Using the example of Latin American literatures, this study provides innovative insights into the literary modeling of shared historical experiences, epistemological crosscurrents, and book market processes within the Global South which thus far have received scant attention" -- Provided by publisher