Multilingual Literature as World Literature

Multilingual Literature as World Literature examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures.

The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research. First, by looking at how engaging with multilingualism as a mode of reading makes visible the multiple pathways of circulation, including as aesthetics or poetics emerging in the literary world when languages come into contact with each other. Second, by exploring how politics and ethics contribute to shaping multilingual texts at a particular time and place, with a focus on the local as a site for the interrogation of global concerns and a call for diversity. Third, by engaging with translation and untranslatability in order to consider the ways in which ideas and concepts elude capture in one language but must be read comparatively across multiple languages. And finally, by proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.

Jane Hiddleston is Professor of Literatures in French at the University of Oxford, UK. Her previous books include Writing After Postcolonialism: Francophone North African Literature in Transition (Bloomsbury, 2017), Understanding Postcolonialism (2009) and Postructuralism and Postcoloniality (2010).

Wen-chin Ouyang is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London, UK. She is the author of Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997).