World Literatures

Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange. How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values? Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.