The Handbook offers the first systematic overview of key transformations of Modern Languages Studies (MLS) in the present century and explores how new framing concepts – ‘the transnational’, ‘the global’, ‘the world’, ‘the planetary’, ‘the local’ – modify entrenched notions of nationhood. It not only analyses new approaches to the study of humanity across body and mind, discourse and matter, the normal and the pathological but also looks at new perspectives on humanity’s subdivisions across gender, race, sexuality and disability, as well as shifting relationships with non-human ‘Others’. The Handbook maps out how specific cultural forms – literary, visual, performative, musical – govern knowledge production in MLS, while also addressing the relevance of new digital media, the growing importance of multi- and inter-mediality, and the expanding role of ‘translation’ as both practice and concept. Drawing on scholars from different language areas and specialities, it considers what (inter-)disciplinarity means in MLS and how the field intersects with other disciplines, from history and philosophy to politics and law to medicine and the neurosciences, not least through key boundary concepts, such as ‘narrative’ or ‘cognition’.
