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The Reader's Companion To World Literature



2021 PROSE Finalist Single and Multivolume Reference, & Textbooks in the HumanitiesA Companion to World Literature is a far-reaching and sustained study of key authors, texts, and topics from around the world and throughout history. Six comprehensive volumes present essays from over 300 prominent international scholars focusing on many aspects of this vast and burgeoning field of literature, from its ancient origins to the most modern narratives.




The Reader's Companion To World Literature



Almost by definition, the texts of world literature are unfamiliar; they stretch our hermeneutic circles, thrust us before unfamiliar genres, modes, forms, and themes. They require a greater degree of attention and focus, and in turn engage our imagination in new ways. This Companion explores texts within their particular cultural context, as well as their ability to speak to readers in other contexts, demonstrating the ways in which world literature can challenge parochial world views by identifying cultural commonalities.


Each unique volume includes introductory chapters on a variety of theoretical viewpoints that inform the field, followed by essays considering the ways in which authors and their books contribute to and engage with the many visions and variations of world literature as a genre.


A significant addition to the field, A Companion to World Literature provides advanced students, teachers, and researchers with cutting-edge scholarship in world literature and literary theory.


Wiebke Denecke is Professor of East Asian Literatures and Comparative Literature at Boston University. Her research interests include premodern literature and thought of the Sinographic Sphere (China, Japan, Korea), comparative studies of East Asia and the premodern world, world literature, and the politics of cultural heritage and memory.


B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German and Director of the Center for South Asia at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century German literature and culture, migrants and refugees in the German and European contexts, book and digital cultural histories, world literature, and theories of cosmopolitanism, globalization, postcolonialism, and transnationalism.


Jonathan Cullick's guide represents more than a reader's companion to what is arguably America's greatest political novel. Though published seventy years ago, All the King's Men remains a timely contribution to the nation's ongoing dialogue about the friction between democratic ideals and human failings. Cullick offers thoughtful readers a starting point for discussing the viewpoints that both unite and divide us. Bipartisan and balanced, the questions he raises are as fresh and relevant today as they were in the late 1930s during the rise of fascism and the excesses of untempered populism and demagoguery. The role of a free press also has particular significance. This book reinvigorates a much-needed national conversation about the future of democracy.


Salgado, Minoli (2007)The Politics of the Palimpsest in 'The Moor's Last Sigh'. In: Gurnah, Abdulrazak (ed.) The Cambridge companion to Salman Rushdie. Cambridge companions to literature . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 153-167. ISBN 9780521847193


Salgado, Minoli (2005)Writing home. In: Lee, Maurice A (ed.) Writers on writing: the art of the short story. Contributions to the study of world literature (128). Praeger, Westport, Conn, pp. 27-31. ISBN 9780313315923


Salgado, Minoli (2001)Anita Desai. In: Fallon, Erin, Feddersen, R C, Kurtzleben, James, Lee, Maurice A and Rochette-Crawley, Susan (eds.) A reader's companion to the short story in English. Greenwood Press, Westport, Conn, pp. 133-142. ISBN 9780313291043


Understood as a system of actions designed to reduce the suffering of distant humans across the world, humanitarianism is intimately connected to storytelling as a means of raising awareness and generating empathy. Humanitarian beliefs and efforts are as diverse as the religious and secular moral philosophies that motivate them. Both aid organizations and government leaders have drawn on humanitarian discourses to gather support for such things as shipments of clothing and medical supplies to those in need, resettlement opportunities for refugees, and even military interventions in the Global South. As cultural platforms that promote themes of human dignity as well as liberal freedom and autonomy, humanitarianism and literature share long histories of influencing each other since the late 18th century. With the adoption of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights in response to the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany during World War II, humanitarianism and the related discourse of human rights have received an increase in popular and literary interest in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Whether or not these discourses are enough to counter the incredible violence of the contemporary period has been the subject of much debate. Global literatures support and critique humanitarianism and human rights as they retell histories of disaster, warfare, and state violence. As literature continues to variously imagine the causes of and responses to world suffering, the intersections of humanitarianism, human rights, and global literature embody a rich site of contestation and possibility for study in the 21st century. 2ff7e9595c


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