ABSTRACT

The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History is a comprehensive and engaging volume, combining essays from historians and literary academics to create a space for productive cross-cultural encounters between the two fields. In addition to the 27 essays, the Companion includes general introductions from two of the leading scholars of history and literature, David Damrosch and Patrick Manning, as well as personal testimonies from artists working in the area, and editorials asking provocative questions.

The volume includes sections on:

  • People – with essays looking at World Literature, Intellectual Commerce, Religion, language and war, and Indigenous ethnography
  • Networks and methods – examining maps, geography, morality and the crises of world literature
  • Transformations – including essays on race, colonialism, and the non-human

Interdisciplinary and groundbreaking, this volume brings to light various ways in which scholars of literature and history analyse, assimilate or reveal the intellectual heritage of the past, at the same moment as they try consciously to deal with an unending amount of new information and an awareness of global connections and discrepancies. Including work from leading academics in the field, as well as newer voices, the Companion is ideal for students and scholars alike.

part |28 pages

Introductions

chapter 2|15 pages

Moving institutions

World history and its beginnings in theory

section 1|106 pages

People

chapter 3|11 pages

Artist in action

On the lack of an adequate critical vocabulary

chapter 4|15 pages

From literary predation to global intellectual commerce

World literature, world history, and the modes of cultural exchange in the work of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Wolfgang Goethe

chapter 6|13 pages

Modernity, reason and historical progress

Keshab Chandra Sen and the history of the world

chapter 7|11 pages

Along the frontiers of religion, language and war

Baba Ounus Saldin’s Syair Faid al-Abad

chapter 8|18 pages

In the worlds of Nizāmī of Ganjeh

Layli and Majnūn and the riddle of courtly love

chapter 10|13 pages

Literary historical intersections

Indigenous ethnography and rewriting history from Mexico to Palestine

section 2|112 pages

Networks and method

chapter 11|9 pages

Artist in action

My borderland

chapter 13|13 pages

Classics

History and geography

chapter 15|11 pages

Bridges across the seas

chapter 17|12 pages

In pursuit of happiness

A first exploration of morality in big history 1

chapter 18|15 pages

The crises of world literature

Suez from building to Bandung

chapter 19|13 pages

Afro-Latin-Africa

Movement and memory in Benin

section 3|101 pages

Transformations

chapter 20|17 pages

Artist in action

On Parallax

chapter 22|12 pages

Dragging Baltimore into the Bay of Bengal

Race, colonialism and global capitalism beyond the Black Atlantic in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies

chapter 23|9 pages

Connecting to power

Imagined genealogies in Southern China and Mainland Southeast Asia

chapter 24|13 pages

Eclipsing Mexico

Translationscapes of Ōe Kenzaburō

chapter 25|11 pages

Colliding forms in literary history

A reading of Natsume Sôseki’s Light and Dark 1

chapter 26|12 pages

Dance as historical narrative

The National Ballet of Mali’s Sunjata and the enactment of oral literature

chapter 27|14 pages

Brazilian literary theory’s challenge before the non-human

Three encounters and an epilogue