Film as World Literature

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adaptation studies
aesthetics
angle
art history
avant-garde
Bond
Caribbean studies
Category=ATFA
Category=DSA
Category=DSM
Category=JBCC1
Chilean avant-garde
Chinese literary movements
circulation
Cold War cinema
commercialism
comp lit
Contemporary Cinema
elitism
environmentalism
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
experimentation
film technologies
frame
genre
globalization
Hong Kong
image formation
indexicality
Irish literature and language
literary history
literary narrative
literary prestige
literary theory
media cultures
Mexican popular culture
multilingualism
narrative pleasure
neoliberalism
Neorealism
politics
postcolonialism
representation
science fiction
silent cinema
social contexts
Soviet Studies
specialization
the gaze
translation studies
visual techniques
world cinema
worlding

Product details

  • ISBN 9798765113400
  • Weight: 580g
  • Dimensions: 150 x 230mm
  • Publication Date: 13 Nov 2025
  • Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
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Redefines the theoretical and thematic contents of world literature by considering it in connection with film.

What gets lost when we understand film as essentially different from literature? What gets lost when we think them essentially the same? Does the constructed difference between literature and film also create social and political exclusions, exclusions that may exacerbate class struggle or exclusions of certain ways of thinking the future as different? Film as World Literature seeks to undo disciplines and disciplinarity: the division between film and literature, indeed, conceals the possibilities of “world” by bracketing out “undisciplined” parts.

Contributors apply ideas of “translatability” and “untranslatability” not just as a linguistic exercise of transfers between language groups, cultures, and national origins but also as an approach to media and transfers between media. Is film a visual acknowledgement that literary language is, by definition, multilingual – that is, is film a place where political conflicts, as Bakhtin observed, can be rendered visible? Chapters discuss film’s relation to world literature not only by considering literary adaptations across nations, regions, languages, ideologies, and contexts but also by exploring film’s intersections with literary theory, narrative, history, genre, and experimentation.

Film as World Literature calls for recognition that while the category of “world” demands a radical defense in the face of risks to democracy, the world that literature and film combined bring forth must interrogate the conditions for a future politics of interaction, engagement, belonging, and difference.

Robin Truth Goodman is a Distinguished Research Professor of English at Florida State University, USA. Her many previous publications include Cinema and the Political Imagination: Third Cinema and Its After-Image (2025), Gender Commodity: Marketing Feminist Identities and the Promise of Security (Bloomsbury, 2022), The Bloomsbury Handbook of 21st Century Feminist Theory (2019); Promissory Notes: On the Literary Conditions of Debt (2018); Gender for the Warfare State: Literature of Women in Combat (2017); and Literature and the Development of Feminist Theory (2016).