Multilingual Literature as World Literature

This wide-ranging collection makes a bracing intervention both in translation studies and in current debates over world literature. Moving beyond the common emphasis in both fields on a movement of texts from one language to another, Hiddleston and Ouyang and their contributors construe multilingualism as a fundamental feature of world literature, and of literature's worldliness. From its trenchant introduction through its illuminating case studies, Multilingual Literature as World Literature exemplifies the border-crossing fluidity it celebrates. --David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, USA Viewing world literature not as books in circulation but, importantly, as writing that emerges in the world's swirl of tongues, Hiddleston and Ouyang's volume demonstrates the urgency and rich rewards of reading literature outside the strictures of monolingualism. --Stefan Helgesson, Professor of English Literary Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden, and co-author of Literature and the World (2020; with Mads Rosendahl Thomsen) The remarkably rich chapters in this book foreground linguistic plurality as the key framework for approaching world literature. The emphases on creativity, imbrication and heterogeneity that ensue constitute a robustly disruptive challenge - notably to the monolingualism, linguistic indifference, Anglonormativity and myths of effortless translatability on which too many previous studies of this literary phenomenon have variously relied. The result is a volume that will become an essential point of reference for all serious scholars in the field of world literature. Here is compelling evidence of creative multilingualism in action. --Charles Forsdick, James Barrow Professor of French, University of Liverpool, UK