Literary Canons National and International

This book examines the role of canonized cultural products in the shaping of communities. In the nineteenth century interpreters often viewed cultural and literary products as the manifestations of nationhood. The preconception underlying this approach was that to understand a national culture from the inside was the only way to understand it. Currently, in a rapidly shrinking world, we witness a tendency towards global unification. The decisive shift is inseparable from the rise of translation, taken in a broad sense, as representing a retextured context, or rather a wide range of modes in interaction, interplay, and input/output interchange between what is "foreign" and what is "familiar." Highlighting the two-way traffic and tension between the traditions inherited from Romanticism and the globalization of the Postmodern age, with the aim of arriving at some form of cross-cultural understanding, is the basic intent of this work.