This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to...

This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of ‘world’ and ‘globe’ concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One – ‘Worlds in Texts’ – to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two – ‘Texts...

This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to...