Literature and the Making of the World

A tour de force in world literature studies. A brilliant, wide-ranging and deeply reflective account that opens up new vistas of theory and critical practice on the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics in world literature. * Debjani Ganguly, Professor of English, University of Virginia, USA, and Editor of The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021) * This volume offers a fascinating insight into the interplay between the cosmopolitan and the vernacular in a wide-ranging group of examples from different cultures and periods. The series introduction provides an incisive overview of how this approach to literary studies relates to other theories of world literature, setting out its difference from theories of systems and circulation, as well as from other relational pairs, such as the centre and periphery or the global and local. The emphasis in this particular volume is on how the polysemic concept of the world embraces the linguistic, the anthropological and the cultural, among others; literature contributes to making these worlds on overlapping intratextual and extratextual levels. The nine essays collected here explore the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic through a mixture of close reading and cultural analysis, always sensitive to context, nuance and plurality. Literature and the Making of the World is warmly recommended not just to readers interested in the debates surrounding world literature, or to readers interested in the specific case studies, but also to those who are interested in how literature contributes to the ways that we create and make sense of the world around us. * Richard Hibbitt, Co-Director of the Centre for World Literatures, University of Leeds, UK * World literature in this collection is less a stable system and more a dynamic set of constellations, constantly made, unmade and remade. Cosmopolitan and vernacular become unfixed and take on many guises in this theoretically and empirically rich and exciting collection. * Francesca Orsini, Professor Emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literatures, SOAS, University of London, UK *

Stefan Helgesson is Professor of English Literary Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden, and a senior research associate at Rhodes University, South Africa. He currently leads the Swedish research initiative Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures. Helena Bodin is Professor of Literature in the Department of Culture and Aesthetics at Stockholm University, Sweden. Annika Mrte Alling is Associate Professor of French Literature at stfold University College, Norway.

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Series Introduction The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden), Christina Kulberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Paul Tenngart (Lund University, Sweden) and Helena Wulff (Stockholm University, Sweden) Introduction Literature and the Making of the World Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden) Part 1 Worlds in Texts: Languages and Narrative 1. Narrating the Crisis of Constantinople 19081922: A Lost World in Greek, Armenian, Turkish and Russian Helena Bodin (Stockholm University, Sweden) 2. The Worlds of Multiglossia in Modern Chinese Fiction: Lu Xuns 'A Madmans Diary' and the 'Shaky House' Lena Rydholm (Uppsala University, Sweden) 3. Writing Vulnerable Worlds: Siberian Exile and the Anthropology of World-Making Mattias Viktorin (Stockholm University, Sweden) 4. The Making of Paris in Novels by Balzac and Flaubert Annika Mrte Alling (Lund University, Sweden) 5. Joseph Brodskys Returns to Venice in Watermark: Old-World Cosmopolitanism Revisited Anna Ljunggren (Stockholm University, Sweden) Part 2 Texts in Worlds: Production and Material Practices 6. A Homemade History: Documenting the Harlem Renaissance in Alexander Gumbys Scrapbooks Irina Rasmussen (Stockholm University, Sweden) 7. The Little Magazine as a World-Making Form: Literary Distance and Political Contestation in Southern African Journals Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden) 8. Worlds in a Tangle: The Promotion of Writing in India between the Vernacular and the Global Per Sthlberg (Sdertrn University, Sweden) 9. Loss of Words and End of Worlds: Transitions and Troubles of Travel Writing Anette Nyqvist (Stockholm University, Sweden) Afterword World Literature in the Making Co-written by the contributors Index