Description
Book SynopsisWe have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary
Trade Review"Co-Winner of the 2016 MLA Prize for a First Book, Modern Language Association"
"Allan’s incisive
In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt mobilizes reading as a framework for interrogating the now ubiquitous field of world literature. . . .
In the Shadow of World Literature’s critical self-positioning of its own sites of reading (US academia, comparative literature, the Egyptian colonial archive), alongside consistent signposting for the book’s broader argument, are a refreshing departure from the stylistic tendencies of most first monographs."
---Hoda El Shakry, Journal of Arabic LiteratureTable of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Notes on Transliteration xiii INTRODUCTION 1 Of Words and Worlds 1 Literary Modernity in Colonial Egypt 5 Reading Beyond Representation 7 The Moral Universe of a Secular World 9 A User's Guide 12 1 WORLD The World of World Literature 17 The Constraints of Democratic Criticism 19 International Standards of Excellence? 25 World Literary Space 29 The Saidian Grounds of Worldliness 32 The Force of a Secular World 37 2 TRANSLATION The Rosetta Stone from Object to Text 39 Making Stones Speak 42 Leveling Languages, or The Conditions of Equivalence 45 Entextualization and the Purely Literary 48 The Contours of a Literary Empire 52 3 EDUCATION The Moral Imperative of Modernization 55 Failure's Success: Securing the Imagined Future 58 From Prejudice to Opinion 61 Governing Hermeneutics, Producing Subjects 63 The Colonial Cultivation of Character 66 Immanently Modern and Uncritically Civilized 70 4 LITERATURE How Adab Became Literary 74 A World in Words: Philology as Pedagogy 77 Literary Institutions and the Instantiation of World Literature 80 Footnoting Literature, or The Literary Footnote 83 Orientalism, or Literature for Its Own Sake 87 Disciplines and Frames of Reading 91 5 CRITIQUE Debating Darwin 94 Soundness and the Poetics of the Appropriate 97 The Force of the Illiterate Reader 102 A Passion to Be Cultured: Constructing Intellect and Ignorance 105 Relating Religion: The Discursive Limits of Character 109 The Borders of a Darwinian World 112 6 INTELLECTUALS The Provincialism of a Literary World 115 The Bonds of World Literature 116 Literary Imaginings of Religious Difference 119 Whispers at the Limits of Literary Experience 123 A World Untouched by Literature 127 Provincial Cosmopolitanism 129 CONCLUSION 131 The Dynamics of a Global Public 134 Literary Myopia 135 How to Love the World Properly 138 Notes 141 Bibliography 163 Index 175
