What Is World Literature? by David Damrosch

£42.00
Out of stock
Product Ref. (e.g. ISBN, SKU)
9780691049861
Published:
15 Apr 2003
Format:
Paperback
Number of pages:
344 pages
Dimensions:
234.95x152.4x24mm
Weight:
0.520kgs
Author:
In case studies, ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs, the medieval to the post-modern, this text explores the way works of literature change as they move from national to global contexts.

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.

About the Author: David Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature and director of the Institute for World Literature at Harvard University, and a past president of the American Comparative Literature Association.

More Information
Number of pages 344

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