Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective is a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsradet). Initiated in 1996 and launched in 1999, it aims at finding suitable methods and approaches for studying and analysing literature globally, emphasizing the comparative and intercultural aspect. Until today, literary cultures and traditions have usually been studied separately, each field using its own principles and methods. The project can be considered as a contribution to gradually removing this problem and helping to gain a better understanding of literature and...
Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective is a research project funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsradet). Initiated in 1996 and l...
Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and the lusophone literature of Angola and Mozambique.
Stefan Helgesson suggests that the prevalence of a ~coloniala (TM) languages such as English and Portuguese in a ~anticoloniala (TM) or a ~postcoloniala (TM) African Literature is primarily an effect of the print network. Helgesson aims to demystify the authority of English and Portuguese by stressing the materiality of the print medium and emphasising the strong transnational and...
Considering the growing interest in South African Literature at the moment, this study looks at both the Anglophone literature of South Africa and ...
In the 1980's, South African literary criticism was preoccupied with the issue of political responsibility and various aspects of literary texts were largely ignored by the dominant critical debates of the time. By focusing on the predicament of literary writing in times of historical turmoil, Writing in Crisis investigates three central apartheid-era texts that attempt to engage a cultural form and deviate from it at the same time. Helgesson argues that Fools and Other Stories by Njabulo Ndebele, A Sport of Nature by Nadine Gordimer, and Life & Times of Michael K by J.M. Coetzee, each...
In the 1980's, South African literary criticism was preoccupied with the issue of political responsibility and various aspects of literary texts were ...
If anything is certain in human existence, it is the exit. Before the universal yet radically singular event of death, however, history leaves its mark on us by determining which exits are possible, necessary or desirable. This collection of essays, which celebrates the achievement of the Swedish Africanist and postcolonial scholar Raoul Granqvist, deal with the broad theme of exit - in the form of exile, displacement, suicide, endings and, indeed, beginnings. After all, "In my end is my beginning" (T.S. Eliot). Childhood as exit rite in contemporary African literature (Camara Laye's...
If anything is certain in human existence, it is the exit. Before the universal yet radically singular event of death, however, history leaves its mar...
This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended, active, and ultimately more literary sense of what it means to institute world literature, it views processes of institutionalizationnot as limitations, but as challenges to understand how literature may simultaneously function as an enabling and exclusionary world of its own. It starts from the observation that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators,...
This volume engages critically with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study. On the basis of an extended,...
