This pathbreaking collection explores a new concept in world literature studies. Going beyond the binary opposition of “major” and “minor” literatures, the ultraminor encompasses the literatures of smaller but vibrant regional and linguistic communities. Using cases as varied as the literatures of Malta, Mauritius, and the Faroe Islands, contemporary Nahuatl novels, Kafka in Prague, and Shakespeare in Naples, the ten essays in this volume take up questions of scale and circulation, the interplay of languages and dialects, and ultraminor writers’ resistance to translation and their...

What is the ocean’s role in human and planetary history? How have writers, sailors, painters, scientists, historians, and philosophers from across time and space poetically envisioned the oceans and depicted human entanglements with the sea? In order to answer these questions, Søren Frank covers an impressive range of material in A Poetic History of the Oceans: Greek, Roman and Biblical texts, an Icelandic Saga, Shakespearean drama, Jens Munk’s logbook, 19th century-writers such as James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Jules Michelet, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Jonas Lie, and Joseph...

In Mobilities and Cosmopolitanisms, Anna-Leena Toivanen combines mobilities research, postcolonial literary studies, and theories of cosmopolitanism to explore the representations and often complex intertwinements of different mobility practices and cosmopolitanisms in contemporary Franco- and Anglophone African and Afrodiasporic literary texts.

The 2019 congress of the International Comparative Literature Association attracted many hundreds of scholars from all around the world to Macau. This volume contains a modest selection of papers to discuss the four hottest fields of the discipline: the future of comparison, the position of national and diaspora literature in the context of globalization, the importance of translation, and the concepts of world literature. The contributions cover huge geographical and cultural areas, but pay special attention to the connections between Western (both American and European) and Asian...

What is the role of literature in our global landscape today? How do local authors respond to the growing worldwide power of English and the persisting effects of the colonial systems that paved the way for globalization today? These questions have often been approached very differently by postcolonialists and by students of world literature, but over the past two decades, a developing dialogue between these divergent approaches has produced robust scholarship and sometimes fractious debate, as issues of language, politics, and cultural difference have come to the fore. Drawing on a wide...