2021 PROSE Finalist Single and Multivolume Reference, & Textbooks in the Humanities
A 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.
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.
- Explores how texts, tropes, narratives, and genres reflect nations, languages, cultures, and periods
- Links world literary theory and texts in a clear, synoptic style
- Identifies how individual texts are influenced and affected by issues such as intertextuality, translation, and sociohistorical conditions
- Presents a variety of methodologies to demonstrate how modern scholars approach the study of world literature
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.
About the Author: Ken Seigneurie is Professor of World Literature at Simon Fraser University. He has published works on modern Arabic, French and British fiction, literary theory, and the history of humanist thought.
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.
Christine Chism is Professor of English at UCLA, after holding positions at Rutgers University and Allegheny College. Between 2003 and 2005, she was the recipient of a New Directions Mellon fellowship to learn Arabic and study Islamic societies, and she teaches and publishes on the interconnections of premodern cultures, issues of race and gender, and the uses of literary history and fantasy.
Ilaria L.E. Ramelli is Professor of Theology and K. Britt Chair in Christology at the Graduate School of Theology, SHMS (St. Thomas Aquinas University 'Angelicum'). She specializes in ancient, late antique, and early medieval philosophy and theology.
Christopher Lupke is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Chair of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. He specializes in the study of modern Chinese literature and cinema, with particular emphasis on Taiwan and Sinophone culture.
Evan Nicoll-Johnson is an instructor in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. He studies early medieval Chinese literature and culture, with research interests that include poetic and narrative literature of the Northern and Southern dynasties, and the history of books and bibliographic scholarship.
Frieda Ekotto is Professor of Afro-American and African Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian and philosopher with areas of expertise in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Anglophone and Francophone literature and in the cinema of West Africa and its diaspora, she concentrates on contemporary issues of law, race, and LGBTQI+ issues.
Abigail E. Celis is an Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania State University in the departments of French and Francophone Studies and African Studies. Her research and teaching center on race and gender in the creative and critical expression of the sub-Saharan African diaspora in France, spanning a range of primary sources that include visual art, literature, cinema, and museum practices.
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.
