商品簡介
From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, Recoding World Literature presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation on routes of Bibliomigrancy--physical and virtual movement of books--this book narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Shifting current scholarship's focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, this book claims that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.
Mani argues that proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation's relationship with print culture, a Faustian pact with books. With its turbulent historical and political transformations over the past two hundred years, Germany serves as an excellent case study. Mani reframes the most well known statements on world literature from the German-speaking world--Goethe, Marx and Engels, Heine, Hesse, Auerbach--in two ways. First, he juxtaposes their statements with those of non-German authors such as Orhan Pamuk, Mahadevi Varma, and Susan Sontag. And second, he situates German voices within a global network of interconnected print- and political histories. Meticulously researched, this book presents many new archival findings, which include orientalist collections in the royal libraries of Berlin and Munich, sponsored translation projects such as the Oriental Translation Fund, affordable book series such as Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek, Tagore and Rolland's failed idea of a "World Library," the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, book politics in the former GDR, all the way to virtual collections, such as the European Digital Library.
Using print cultural history to reveal the political foundations of a world literary history, Mani opens up multiple meanings of world literature: as a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.
作者簡介
B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also affiliated with the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture and the Institute for Regional and International Studies.
