Description
Book SynopsisWhat makes a world author? How did Homer become a cosmopolitan author? How does a Mayan creation narrative challenge our Western logocentric ideas of foundational texts? What might world literature look like to a fourth-century Roman reader? How do past and more recent translations of Dante's
Commedia help us to rethink the changing definitions of world literature? How did the Alexander romance adapt to an Islamic context? How did Tasso's epic adapt to a later cultural context dominated by the Turkish Fear? What shaped the West's first impression of
The Tale of Genji? How does the Ovidian myth of Arachne migrate from Japan to the Caribbean? What are the foundational metaphors at the root of Goethe's
weltliteratur paradigm? What happens when cultures import canonical texts for lack of their own? By what process does an eccentric writer reconstruct a new foundational text from heterogeneous fragments of other cultures? How did literary criticism contribute to the can
Table of ContentsContents: Dominique Jullien: Introduction – Piero Boitani: World Literature Two Thousand Years Ago: Reflections of a Senator in 306 A.D. – Suzanne Saïd: Homer, or How to Create a World Writer – Gerardo Aldana: On Deciphering Ancient Mesoamerican Foundational Texts: The Challenges of a Non-Logos-Based Creation Narrative – Ulrich Marzolph: The Creative Reception of the
Alexander Romance in Iran – Sandra Bermann: In the Light of Translation: on Dante and World Literature – Richard Van Leeuwen: The Canonization of the
Thousand and One Nights in World Literature: The Role of Literary Criticism – Peter Madsen: Epic Encounters - from Torquato Tasso’s
Gerusalemme Liberata to Miklós Zrinyi’s
Obsidio Szigetiana – Paulo Lemos Horta:
The Lusiads as World Literature: The Romantic Hypothesis of Eastern Influence on Camões – Azadeh Yamini Hamedani: Foundational Metaphors: Goethe’s World Literature; Posnett’s Comparative Literature – Evanghelia Stead: Worldwide Tales and the Latin Tradition: The Myth of Arachne in Jan Havlasa’s
Four Japanese Tales (1919) and Grace Hallworth’s
A Web of Stories (1990) – Michael Emmerich: A New Planet:
The Tale of Genji as World Literature – Stefan Helgesson: «… A casement opening on the spectacle of the world …»: Post-European Texts in Translation – Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: Subversive Foundations: Renaissance Classics and the Imported Canon – Juan Pablo Lupi: (Mis)Reading as Engagement: Some Thoughts on World Literature and José Lezama Lima.
