Introduction

The “Introduction” presents a new approach to literary multilingualism by demonstrating it as a phenomenon that emerges as a result of interactions between authors, texts and readers, as well as literary and political institutions on different societal levels. It emphasizes the practices and processes of linguistic borders, as opposed to a notion of multilingualism as a stable entity, identifiable by analysing texts against a set of fixed criteria. The “Introduction” also provides an overview of research on literary multilingualism in the last decades, including emerging new directions. The chapter concludes by providing a novel theoretical framework for the study of literary multilingualism, demonstrating how linguistic borders are actively formed in the production, circulation and reception of literature, and that processes of “bordering” have large-scale effects on conceptions of literature and its value.