World Literature combines theoretical explorations and pedagogy to explore approaches to teaching some of the key concepts, issues, and topics in world literary studies. This collection offers accessible guide to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students taking world literature courses in different parts of the world.
World Literature: Approaches, Practices, and Pedagogy combines theoretical explorations and pedagogy to explore approaches to teaching some of the key concepts, issues, and topics in world literary studies.
Recognising the evolving, and at times contested, meanings of ‘world literature,’ this book treats world literature as a mode of reading and one that provides opportunities to create a space for critical discussions and reflections on understanding, unpacking, and at times, challenging, some of the assumptions and practices in world literary studies. Contributors discuss a wide array of topics, including the role of translation and literary marketplace in global circulation of texts, the function and problematics of paratexts, questions of co-authorship in transnational contexts, debates on major/minor in world literature, cosmopolitanism, and the impact of English as a lingua franca on the development of the field.
Accompanied by reading questions, individual and group exercises, as well as suggested further readings, this collection offers a practical resource for instructors and an accessible guide to advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students taking world literature courses in different parts of the world.
Introduction - Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee and Eli Park Sorensen; Part I: Key
Concepts and Ideas;
1. Whose World? The Worldliness of World Literature -
Vincenzo Bavaro and Shirley Geok-Lin Lim;
2. Translation, Multilingualism and
Literature - Françoise Král;
3. The Local and the Global: Michael de Assis, A
Writer on the Margin - Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos;
4. Cosmopolitanism - Eli
Park Sorensen;
5. Circulation and the Literary Marketplace: Packaging Japan
in Paratexts for English Translations of Japanese Literature - Alex Watson;
Part II: Critical Reading and Interpretation;
6. Readers, Texts, and
Participation: Placemaking and Experiencing from Sketches by Boz, Let Them
Call It Jazz, to Invisible Cities - Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee;
7. From Folklore
to World Literature: Reading Indigenous Responses to Place and Belonging in
the Bleek-Lloyd Archive of San Kukummi - Lars Atkin;
8. A Cosmopolitan
Orientation: Teaching About Migrant Labor and Literary Form in Timothy Mos
Renegade or Halo2 and José Dalisays Soledads Sister - Angelia Poon;
9.
Silent Subject: Class, Migration, and Narration in Yan Geling's Lost Daughter
of Happiness - Clara Iwasaki;
10. Collaborative Refugee Literature and
Dialogic Teaching in Times of Humanitarian Crisis: Towards a Plural
Understanding of the World - Núria Codina Solà;
11. All Literature is World
Literature in Waiting: A Case for Global South Languages and African
Literature - Mukoma Wa Ngugi; Index
Klaudia Hiu Yen Lee is Associate Professor at the Department of English of the City University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Charles Dickens and China: Cross-Cultural Encounters, 18951915 (2017) and Spatial Stories and Intersecting Geographies: Hong Kong, Britain, and China, 18901940 (2025).
Eli Park Sorensen is Associate Professor in the English Department at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Postcolonial Studies and the Literary (2010), Postcolonial Realism and the Concept of the Political (2021), and Science Fiction Film (2021).
