Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This “intersectional” revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's “national poet,” Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or “Romanian literature in the plural.” Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and émigré literature, and translation.

Francophone Literature as World Literature examines French-language works from a range of global traditions and shows how these literary practices draw individuals, communities, and their cultures and idioms into a planetary web of tension and cross-fertilization. The Francophone corpus under scrutiny here comes about in the evolving, markedly relational context provided by these processes and their developments during and after the French empire. The 15 chapters of this collection delve into key aspects, moments, and sites of the literature flourishing throughout the francosphere after World War II and especially since the 1980s, from the French Hexagon to the Caribbean and India, and from Québec to the Maghreb and Romania. Understood and practiced as World Literature, Francophone literature claims--with particular force in the wake of the littérature-monde debate--its place in a more democratic world republic of letters, where writers, critics, publishers, and audiences are no longer beholden to traditional centers of cultural authority.

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.

Shortlisted for the AATSEEL 2022 Award for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume (AATSEEL is The American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages) Theory in the "Post" Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the “post” era. Since the Cold War's end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath - and sometimes just the “after” - of whole paradigms, the crisis or “passing” of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural “condition,” as well as the corresponding rise of an antagonist model, of an “anti,” “meta,” or “neo” alternative, with examples ranging from “posthumanism” and “post-postmodernism” to “post-aesthetics,” “postanalog” interpretation or “digicriticism,” “post-presentism,” “post-memory,” “post-“ or “neo-critique,” and so forth. It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argue, that this “post” moment is also a time when theory is practiced as a world genre. If theory has always been a “worlded” enterprise, a quintessentially communal, cross-cultural and international project, this is truer at present than ever. Perhaps more than other humanist constituencies, today's theorists work and belong in a theory commons that is transnational if still uneven economically, politically, and otherwise. Theory in the "Post" Era reports the results of Romanian theory experiments that join efforts made in other places to foster a theory for the “post” age.

What is the human being duty and what is the source of my restlessness, of my metaphysical impatience? Could it be that exile has made me a woman of no fixed abode? These questions are coming from a woman with hybrid origins who lived in a communist dictatorship country; fought injustice and censorship and was punished by the secret police; was involved in Romania’s 1989 Revolution; witnessed the post-communist nomenclature and secret police stealing back the country; wrote the history of the world fiction, a comparative study in Romanian; at the age of 44 she left both her home and her language behind and settled into the US and into English as she saw herself as an exile not just from her country but from her mother tongue too; founded GlobaLex, an iconic research tool, at the NYU School of Law Hauser Global Program; and has collected multiple honors in Romania and in the US, including Romania’s Officer of the National Order for Faithful Service. She uses her European literary references as an enhancement for her range of American tonalities. The daughter of Hrisula Limona, a woman belonging to an ancient Armân/Vlach clan from the Pindus Mountains, and Iancu Roznowski, of Polish descent, whose ancestors once lived at the Imperial Court of Habsburgs in Vienna, Mirela Roznoveanu was born on April 10, 1947 in the Kingdom of Romania. A few months later (December 1947) the Communists forced Romania’s King to abdicate and the country surrendered to the Communist USSR. Mirela lives in many languages at once and multiple expressions of literary forms. She is a cosmopolitan writer. Her slogan is “I am curious therefore I am”. For Mirela forgetting is an impossible task and she turns this inability into memorable stories. Her knowledge of philosophy, fiction writing, literary criticism and theory is endlessly rich. Mirela is not only a literary critic, novelist, and a poet but also a journalist and an intellectual with an incisive intelligence and a great sense of social justice. Epic Stories gathers for the first time under the same covers all Mirela Roznoveanu’s literary voices from poetry and literary criticism to journalism, fiction, and travel writing. The reader becomes a witness and a participant into the making of a new life in exile and of the transformation of a foreign language into one that becomes part of the writer’s native language.

This book investigates issues of translation and survival in diasporic and transcultural literature, combining Chinese and Western theories of translation to discuss the centrifugal and centripetal forces that are inherent in diasporic Chinese writers. Cutting across philosophy, semiotics, translation studies and diasporic writing, it the book tackles the complexity of translation as a key tool to re-read the dynamics of Sino-Anglo literary encounters that reset East-West parameters. Focusing on a range of specialized areas of cultural translation sand China-related writings, this book is a key read for scholars of translation and cross-cultural writings, ethnic studies, postcolonial studies, American and Australian literature studies, and global Chinese literature studies.

Disciplines from literary studies to environmentalism have recently undergone a spectacular reorientation that has refocused entire fields, methodologies, and vocabularies on the world and its sister terms such as globe, planet, and earth. The Bloomsbury Handbook of World Theory examines what “world” means and what it accomplishes in different zones of academic study. The contributors raise questions such as: What happens when “world” is appended to a particular form of humanistic or scientific inquiry? How exactly does “worlding” bear on the theoretical operating system and the history of that field? What is the theory or theoretical model that allows “world” to function in a meaningful way in coordination with that knowledge domain? With contributions from 38 leading theorists from a vast range of fields, including queer studies, religion, and pop culture, this is the first large reference work to consider the profound effect, both within and outside the academy, of the worlding of discourse in the 21st century.

This collection gives a diversified account of world literature, examining not only the rise of the concept, but also problems such as the relation between the local and the universal, and the tensions between national culture and global ethics. In this context, it focuses on the complex relationship between Chinese literature and world literature, not only in the sense of providing an exemplary case study, but also as an introspection and re-location of Chinese literature itself. The book activates the concept of world literature at a time when it is facing the rising modern day challenges of race, class and culture.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.