Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters

Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-1-009-42264-2
Verlag: Cambridge University Press

Buch, Englisch, 302 Seiten, Format (B × H): 162 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 562 g

Reihe: Cambridge Studies in World Literature

In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, this book argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bhattacharya, Baidik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Preface and acknowledgement; Introduction: formations of the literary sovereign; Part I. Epistemic Habits: 1. Ethnographic recension; 2. Colonial untranslatables; 3. Comparatism in the colony; Part II. Aesthetic Conventions: 4. Impure aesthetics; 5. Sanskrit on shagreen; 6. National enframing; Coda: Decolonization after world literature; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Über Autor(innen)

Bhattacharya, Baidik
Baidik Bhattacharya is Associate Professor of English at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies. He is the author of the much-acclaimed book Postcolonial Writing in the Era of World Literature: Texts, Territories, Globalizations (2018). His works have appeared in some of the leading journals of our times: Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Boundary 2, Modern Philology, Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, among others.