Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures (Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures)

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures problematizes and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. By showing how the active role of the local, the indigenous and the periphery in international literary exchanges has yet to be critically examined, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in the volume present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In 9 case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contexts–such as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, Catalan and Basque regions in Spain, and the Antilles–the volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practice and demonstrates how vernaculars operate within different literary, critical, cultural, and political circumstances. Cover 1 Contents 6 Notes on contributors 7 Acknowledgements 10 Series introduction – The cosmopolitan–vernacular dynamic: Conjunctions of world literature Stefan Helgesson, Christina Kullberg, Paul Tenngart and Helena Wulff 11 Introduction: Theorizing the vernacular Christina Kullberg and David Watson 28 1 Contextualizing the vernacular: Signposts from African languages, writing, and literature Moradewun Adejunmobi 52 2 Vernacular resistance: Catalan, Basque, and Galician opposition to Francoist monolingualism Christian Claesson 78 3 The modern adventures of Kanian Poongundranar, classical Tamil poet: Reflections on literatures of the world, vernacularly speaking S. Shankar 108 4 Vernacular soundings: Poetry from the Lesser Antilles in the aftermaths of hurricanes Irma and Maria Christina Kullberg 128 5 From Fesiten to Fesibuku: Shifting priorities in the Saamaka vernacular Richard Price and Sally Price 154 6 Cosmopolitan and vernacular dynamics in modern Chinese fiction and Lao She’s satirical novel Cat Country Lena Rydholm 180 7 Worldly themes and vernacular literature: Aino Kallas on gender, ethnicity, and class Katarina Leppänen 208 8 Specters of the vernacular: Neoliberalism, world literature, and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings David Watson 230 9 Vernacular imagination and exophone reconfiguration in Francophone Chinese diasporic literature Shuangyi Li 250 Vernacular lessons: Dante, Cavafy, Gombrowicz (Instead of an afterword) Galin Tihanov 278 Index 288 This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In nine case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contexts-such as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, multilingual regions in Spain, West Africa, and the Caribbean-the volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practice and demonstrates how vernaculars operate within different literary, critical, cultural, and political circumstances. The open access edition of this book is available under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond "Reimagines the vernacular as a critical concept for rethinking world literatures"-- Provided by publisher