Stefan Helgesson

Leve fortsättarna

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. This book sets out to understand how the meaning of 'literature' was transformed in the Global South in the post-1945 era. It looks at institutional contexts in South Africa (mainly Johannesburg), Brazil (São Paulo), Senegal (Dakar) and Kenya (Nairobi), and engages with critical writing in English, Portuguese and French. Critics studied in the book include Antonio Candido, Tim Couzens, Isabel Hofmeyr, Es'kia Mphahlele, Léopold Senghor, Taban Lo Liyong and Ngugi wa Thiong'o. By reading these intellectuals of the Global South as producers of theory and practice in their own right, the book attempts to demonstrate the contingency of what is her called the worlding of the concept of literature. 'Decolonisation' itself is seen as a contingent, non-linear process that unfolds in a recursive dialogue with the past. In a bid to offer a more grounded approach to world literature, a key objective of this study is therefore to investigate the accumulation of temporalities in institutional histories of critical practice. To reach this objective, it engages the method of conceptual history as developed by Reinhart Koselleck and David Scott, demonstrating how the concept of 'literature' is resemanticised in ways that dialectically both challenge and consolidate literature as a concept and practice in post-colonised societies.

Critical Practice in Africa and Brazil After 1945

Decolonisations of Literature

Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique. Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of ‘colonial’ languages such as English and Portuguese in ‘anticolonial’ or ‘postcolonial’ African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. Helgesson aims to demystify the authority of English and Portuguese by stressing the materiality of the print medium and emphasising the strong transnational and transcontinental vectors of southern African literature after the Second World War.

Modernists, Realists, and the Inequality of Print Culture

Transnationalism in Southern African Literature

Yvonne Lindqvist

Helena Wulff

"Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the one-sided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market. How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values? Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address." This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

World Literatures

In the 1980s, South African literary debates were preoccupied with the issue of political responsibility and various aspects of literary texts were largely ignored. By focusing on the predicament of literary writing in times of historical turmoil, Writing in Crisis investigates three central apartheid-era texts that attempt to engage a cultural form and deviate from it at the same time. For students and scholars, Writing in Crisis is an accessible and invaluable addition to South African literary criticism.

Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele, and Coetzee

Writing in Crisis

Helena Bodin

Annika Mörte Alling

"Positioning itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology, and philosophical critiques of "world" and "globe" concepts, this volume investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One-"Worlds in Texts"-to combined analyses of texts, media, and agents in the literary field in Part Two-"Texts in Worlds"-the concerns of these 9 chapters range from multilingualism, genre, and style, to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive, and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice-which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa, and India-the volume's contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent"--

Cosmopolitan Texts, Vernacular Practices

Literature and the Making of the World

Gunilla Lindberg-Wada

Anders Pettersson

Margareta Petersson

Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective is a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). Initiated in 1996 and launched in 1999, it aims at finding suitable methods and approaches for studying and analysing literature globally, emphasizing the comparative and intercultural aspect. Even though we nowadays have fast and easy access to any kind of information on literature and literary history, we encounter, more than ever, the difficulty of finding a credible overall perspective on world literary history. Until today, literary cultures and traditions have usually been studied separately, each field using its own principles and methods. Even the conceptual basis itself varies from section to section and the genre concepts employed are not mutually compatible. As a consequence, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for the interested layperson as well as for the professional student, to gain a clear and fair perspective both on the literary traditions of other peoples and on one's own traditions. The project can be considered as a contribution to gradually removing this problem and helping to gain a better understanding of literature and literary history by means of a concerted empirical research and deeper conceptual reflection. The contributions to the four volumes are written in English by specialists from a large number of disciplines, primarily from the fields of comparative literature, Oriental studies and African studies in Sweden. All of the literary texts discussed in the articles are in the original language. Each one of the four volumes is devoted to a special research topic.

Towards a Global Perspective

Literary History

Volume 1: Notions of Literature Across Cultures. Volume 2: Literary Genres: An Intercultural Approach. Volume 3+4: Literary Interactions in the Modern World 1+2

Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective

The present volume connects three academic fields that share central concerns but remain surprisingly isolated from each other: world literature studies, postcolonial studies, and translation studies. It approaches translation not as a vague metaphor but as a distinct and socially embedded practice that connects literatures. In similar vein, it interrogates the smoothness of many versions of “global” theory by insisting on the specificity of place and the resistance to translatibility among languages, oeuvres and genres. The topics covered in the chapters include the formation of world literature as a progamme of study, the French concept of littérature-monde, the rise of English in nineteenth-century Sweden, the translation of Arabic literature in Europe, and the transnationalism of the avant-garde. Through such case studies, and by drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Édouard Glissant, Pierre Bourdieu and David Damrosch, among others, the international group of contributors add substantially to the theoretical and methodological consolidation of world literature as a field of research.

Studies in World Writing

Literature, Geography, Translation

Det här är en bok som ryms mellan Joakim Pirinens Stockholm och J.M. Coetzees Kapprovins – som rör sig från uppbrottets löfte till ankomstens gåta. Lena Andersson, Alejandro Levia Wenger, Antjie Krog och José Craveirinha är några av den splittrade erfarenhetens författare som flätas in i betraktelsen över vår globala samtid. Kulturell identitet – som att vara svensk eller afrikan – är något som pågår, och som förändras medan det pågår. Med teoretisk bredd och närgången konkretion ger essäerna i "Efter västerlandet" plats åt berättelser som inte ryms i litteraturhandböcker eller reseguiderna. Först kommer variationer på temat Sverige. Sedan introduktioner till postkolonial teori och litteratur. Till sist Mandelas och sanningskommissionens Sydafrika.

Efter västerlandet. Texter om kulturell förändring

Birgit Neumann

Gabriele Rippl

The Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures is the first globally comprehensive attempt to chart the rich field of world literatures in English. Part I navigates different usages of the term ‘world literature’ from an historical point of view. Part II discusses a range of theoretical and methodological approaches to world literature. This is also where the handbook’s conceptualisation of ‘Anglophone world literatures’ – in the plural – is developed and interrogated in juxtaposition with proximate fields of inquiry such as postcolonialism, translation studies, memory studies and environmental humanities. Part III charts sociological approaches to Anglophone world literatures, considering their commodification, distribution, translation and canonisation on the international book market. Part IV, finally, is dedicated to the geographies of Anglophone world literatures and provides sample interpretations of literary texts written in English.

Handbook of Anglophone World Literatures

If anything is certain in human exis tence, it is the exit. Before the universal yet radically singular event of death, how ever, history leaves its mark on us by determining which exits are possible, necessary or desirable. This collection of essays, which celebrates the achievement of the Swedish Africanist and postcolonial scholar Raoul Granqvist, deal with the broad theme of exit OCo in the form of exile, displacement, suicide, endings and, indeed, beginnings. After all, OC In my end is my beginningOCO (T.S. Eliot). Childhood as exit rite in contemporary African literature (Camara LayeOCOs LOCOEnfant Noir and Ishmael BeahOCOs Long Way Gone); the Cameroonian director Jean Pierre BekoloOCOs controversial film Les Saignantes; an early play by Wole Soyinka; Ghana during the First World War; Zakes MdaOCOs Cion; proto-nationalist writing on the Gold Coast; passing in Zo1/2 WicombOCOs Playing in the Light; the exile of South African and Caribbean writers; translation theory in the global South; public representations of Africans in north-east Bavaria; oral poetry in rural England; Fred WahOCOs Swedish-Chinese background in twentieth-century Canada; Toni MorrisonOCOs Beloved and infanticide; the open endings of the poetry of Paul Muldoon; the suicide of Virginia Woolf; the viability of global environmental policies OCo these are some of the topics that this book, in defiance of neat disciplinary boundaries, addresses. The closing section, OC Voicing the Exit, OCO transcends the academic format with its evocative literary representations of the experience of exit (in Tanzania, Uganda, Ukrainian Canada and elsewhere)."

Endings and New Beginnings in Literature and Life

Exit

Annika Morte Alling

Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolian-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the onesided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market. How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values? Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.

Exploring the Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Exchange

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

Literature and the World presents a broad and multifaceted introduction to world literature and globalization. The book provides a brief background and history of the field followed by a wide spectrum of exemplary readings and case studies from around the world. Amongst other aspects of World Literature, the authors look at: New approaches to digital humanities and world literature Ecologies of world literature Rethinking geography in a globalized world Translation Race and political economy Offering state of the art debates on world literature, this volume is a superb introduction to the field. Its critically thoughtful approach makes this the ideal guide for anyone approaching World Literature.

Stefan Helgesson

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