Literature and the Experience of Globalization ― Texts Without Borders

How does literature represent, challenge and help us understand our experience of globalization? Taking literary globalization studies beyond its traditional political focus, Literature and the Experience of Globalization explores how writers from Shakespeare through Goethe to Isak Dinesen, J.M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh and Bruce Chatwin engage with the human dimensions of globalization. Through a wide range of insightful close readings, Svend Erik Larsen brings contemporary world literature approaches to bear on cross-cultural experiences of migration and travel, translation, memory, history and embodied knowledge. In doing so, this important intervention demonstrates how literature becomes an essential site for understanding the ways in which globalization has become an integral part of everyday experience.

Svend Erik Larsen is Professor Emeritus at Aarhus University, Denmark, Yangtze River Professor at Sichuan University, China, and Honorary Professor at University College London, UK. His previous books include, as co-author, Signs in Use: An Introduction to Semiotics (2002).