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This book analyses the field of contemporary Iranian literature. It explores how literature has functioned and circulated since the 1979 revolution until the present, both within Iran and in countries of the Iranian diaspora, focusing on North America, Western Europe and Australia. It focuses on prose productions, analysing several genres and media. The book takes Iran as its starting point, revealing the forms, structures and functions of Iranian literature within Iranian society, before turning to the global diaspora to examine the current dynamics of literary production and circulation between Iranian diasporic spaces and the homeland. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the contemporary Iranian literary field in its relation to the social, economic and political fields, both within Iran and in the diaspora. It is also a critical intervention in the field of World Literature as it explores Persian literary texts and the Iranian literary field in their worldly dimensions, with an interdisciplinary and global perspective. It is based on 15 years of fieldwork and travels in Iran, with unique interviews, data collection and participant observation.

This book attempts to resituate the problem of ‘world literature’, considered as a revived category of theoretical enquiry, by pursuing the literary-cultural implications of the theory of combined and uneven development. The implications of this theory for cultural analysis have received relatively little attention, even though it might be said to draw attention to a central arc or trajectory of modern(ist) production in literature and the other arts worldwide. It is in the conjuncture of combined and uneven development, on the one hand, and the recently interrogated and expanded categories of ‘world literature’ and ‘modernism’, on the other, that this work looks for its specific contours. The first two chapters argue for a single, but radically uneven world-system; a singular modernity, combined and uneven; and a literature that variously registers this combined unevenness in both its form and content to reveal itself as, properly speaking, world-literature. The four substantive chapters that follow explore a selection of modern-era fictions in which the potential of world-literary comparativism is dramatically highlighted. The novel is treated paradigmatically, not exemplarily, as a literary form in which combined and uneven development is manifested with particular salience, due in no small part to its fundamental association with the rise of capitalism and its status in peripheral and semi-peripheral societies as a ‘modernising’ import. The peculiar plasticity and hybridity of the novel form enables it to incorporate not only multiple literary levels, genres and modes, but also other non-literary and archaic cultural forms.

This book presents research on the eastern front of World War I, a subject comparatively eclipsed by scholarly study of the western front. Focusing on the first two years of the war, the volume concentrates primarily on elements of the conflict between the Central Powers (specifically Germany and its ally Austria-Hungary) and pre-revolutionary Russia. The book approaches topics of interest through a tripartite structure, addressing the operational conduct of the war, the combatants’ cultural conceptions of themselves and the enemy, and how the conflict has been understood and commemorated in the years since the end of the war. The volume concludes with a chapter that brings together themes studied throughout the book in a discussion of the potential continuities between the German conduct and perception of war from the First World War to the Second.

This book draws on Edward Said, Aamir Mufti, Jacques Derrida, and world-systems theory to address the institutionalized construct of “world literature” from its origins in Goethe and Marx to the present day.  It argues that through its history, this construct has served to incorporate if not annul local literatures and the concept of “local literature” itself, and to universalize the novel, the lyric poem, and the stage play as the only literary forms appropriate to modernity.  It demonstrates this thesis through a comparative reading of the reinscription of the classical Arabic-Islamic concept of “adab” as “literature” in the modern, European sense in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran in the 19^th to mid-20^th centuries.  It then turns to the Middle Eastern novel in the global contexts of its production, translation, circulation, and reception today.  Through new readings of novels and other literary works by Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Orhan Pamuk, Azar Nafisi, Yasmin Crowther, and Marjane Satrapi, and with reference to landmarks of Middle Eastern and world literary history ranging from the Mu‘allaqāt and Alf Layla wa Layla to Don Quixote, it argues that these texts—like “world literature” itself—are constitutively haunted by specters of the literary forms and traditions, of the life-worlds that they expressed, cast aside by modernity.  In the case of the Middle Eastern novel, it is adab and all that it encompassed in the classical Arab-Islamic world that is suppressed or othered, but that spectral, yet returns in new, genuinely worldly constellations of form.

This volume examines how, why and with what success smaller European literatures – written in less well-known languages from less familiar traditions – endeavour through translation to reach international readers. It argues that prevailing nation- and world-centred theoretical approaches have failed to provide an adequate understanding of the international circulation of these literatures, and instead advocates and models a comparative, interdisciplinary approach that consistently tests theory against concrete experience and practice, and combines literary, historiographical and translation methodologies to produce a far more precise analysis of the strategies, motivations, obstacles and patterns that emerge as these literatures strive to be heard. Through case studies drawn from over thirteen national contexts from Scandinavia and the Low Countries to the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe, the volume analyses how the international perceptions of these literatures are disadvantaged and distorted in theory, reception and industry practice, evaluates successes and failures as these literatures, through state and third-sector intervention and individual innovation, attempt to overcome their marginalization, and charts how the mould of our perception of these literatures might be broken.

Indigenous sign-systems, such as pictographs, petroglyphs, hieroglyphs, and khipu, are usually understood as relics from an inaccessible past. That is far from the truth, however, as this book makes clear. Rather than being dead languages, these sign-systems have always been living, evolving signifiers, responsive to their circumstances and able to continuously redefine themselves and the nature of the world. The book tells the story of the present life of these sign-systems, examining the contemporary impact they have had on poetry, prose, visual art, legal philosophy, political activism, and environmental thinking. In doing so, this study brings together a wide range of indigenous and non-indigenous authors and artists of the Americas, from Aztec priests and Amazonian shamans to Simon Ortiz, Gerald Vizenor, Jaime de Angulo, Charles Olson, Cy Twombly, Gloria Anzaldúa, William Burroughs, Louise Erdrich, Cecilia Vicuña, and many others. From these sources, the book depicts the culture of a modern, interconnected hemisphere, revealing that while these “signs of the Americas” have suffered expropriation, misuse, and mistranslation, they have also created their own systems of knowing and being. These indigenous systems help us to rethink categories of race, gender, nationalism, and history. Producing a new way of thinking about our interconnected hemisphere, this ambitious, energizing book redefines what constitutes a “world” in world literature.

Virginia Woolf Writing the World addresses such themes as the creation of worlds through literary writing, Woolf’s reception as a world writer, world wars, and natural worlds in Woolf’s writings. The collection represents the theme of internationalism in Woolf’s work, but its global appeal is likewise reflected in the diverse range of contributors from around the world. The volume is divided into four themed sections: “War and Peace”; “World Writer(s),” which reads the Woolfs in a global context; “Animal and Natural Worlds,” which brings recent developments in ecocriticism and post-humanist studies to analysis of Woolf ’s writing; and “Writing and Worldmaking,” which addresses various aspects of genre, style, and composition. In addition to a myriad of historical perspectives, the book also brings us back to international and cultural conflicts in our own day, reminding us why Woolf still matters today.

Postcolonial studies has taken a significant turn since 2000 from the post-structural focus on language and identity of the 1980s and 1990s to more materialist and sociological approaches. A key theorist in inspiring this innovative new scholarship has been Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies shows the emergence of this strand of postcolonialism through collecting texts that pioneered this approach—by Graham Huggan, Chris Bongie, and Sarah Brouillette—as well as emerging scholarship that follows the path these critics have established. This Bourdieu-inspired work examines the institutions that structure the creation, dissemination, and reception of world literature; the foundational values of the field and its sometimes ambivalent relationship to the popular; and the ways concepts like habitus, cultural capital, consecration and anamnesis can be deployed in reading postcolonial texts. Topics include explorations of the institutions of the field such as the B.B.C.’s Caribbean voices program and the South African publishing industry; analysis of Bourdieu’s fieldwork in Algeria during the decolonization era; and comparisons between Bourdieu’s work and alternative versions of literary sociology such as Pascale Casanova’s and Franco Moretti’s. The sociological approach to literature developed in the collected essays shows how, even if the commodification of postcolonialism threatens to neutralize the field’s potential for resistance and opposition, a renewed project of postcolonial critique can be built in the contaminated spaces of globalization.

Modern Writers, Transnational Literatures offers a fresh critical perspective on the work of Rabindranath Tagore and W. B. Yeats from the beginning of the twentieth century, the point at which their international collaborations most significantly influence the cross-border lives of their literature. This book foregrounds the Yeats-Tagore relationship, Yeats’s complex engagement with South Asia, the fraught beginning to Tagore’s international fame and the value of reading his English translations as independent products on the global stage. Exploring the thematic parallels and generic innovations in the two authors’ works allows us to recognize the significant moments of tension, intersections, and divergence in their oeuvres. Engaging with their works across genres, with particular attention to the socio-cultural and political backgrounds of the time, this comparative study examines the transnational lives of the texts and provides a timely perspective on how aesthetic and cultural dialogues carry national conversations across borders and into the present day.