Many women in cultures throughout the world exhibit resilience and power in the face of obstacles and vicissitudes. From colonial New Spain to postcolonial Africa and India, Women and Contemporary World Literature examines ways in which women in literature function within their specific culture and circumstances to confront the challenges they encounter. In spite of fragmentation in their lives - much like quiltmakers - they piece together the scraps of their existence to form an integrated and complete whole. With its focus on power, fragmentation, and metaphor, and a strong interdisciplinary approach, this book offers a unique perspective to scholars, teachers, and students of comparative literature, contemporary world literature, colonial and postcolonial literature, women's studies, interdisciplinary studies, and literature and cultural studies.

opinion, the Guide offers a discriminating - and sometimes controversial - view of a broad range of contemporary literatures.

Festschrift volume dedicated to Kamjula Venkata Reddy, b. 1939, former Professor of English, Sri Krishnadevaraya University; contributed articles; some previously published.

Les arrels del realisme màgic en els escrits de Borges i altres autors d'Amèrica Llatina han estat àmpliament reconeguts i ben documentades produint una sèrie d'estudis crítics, molts dels quals figuren en la bibliografia d'aquest treball. Dins d'aquest marc, aquest llibre presenta als lectors una varietat d'escriptores de grups ètnics, conegudes i menys conegudes, i les col·loca en un context literari en el que es tracten tant a nivell individual com a escriptores així com a nivell col·lectiu com a part d'un moviment artístic més ampli. Aquest llibre és el resultat del treball realitzat a les universitats de Sheffield i la de València i representa una valuosa investigació i una important contribució als estudis literaris.

Modernism in Irish Women's Contemporary Writing examines the tangled relationship between contemporary Irish women writers and literary modernism. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, Irish women's fiction has drawn widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, with a surprising number of these works being commended for their innovative redeployment of literary tactics drawn from early twentieth-century literary modernism. But this strategy is not a new one. Across more than a century, writers from Kate O'Brien to Sally Rooney have manipulated and remade modernism to draw attention to the vexed nature of female privacy, exploring what unfolds when the amorphous nature of private consciousness bumps up against external ordering structures in the public world. Living amid the tenaciously conservative imperatives of church and state in Ireland, their female characters are seen to embrace, reject, and rework the ritual of prayer, the fixity of material objects, the networks of the digital world, and the ordered narrative of the book. Such structures provide a stability that is valuable and even necessary for such characters to flourish, as well as an instrument of containment or repression that threatens to, and in some cases does, destroy them. The writers studied here, among them Elizabeth Bowen, Edna O'Brien, Anne Enright, Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett, and Eimear McBride, employ the modernist mode in part to urge readers to recognize that female interiority, the prompt for many of the movement's illustrious formal experiments, continues to provide a crucial but often overlooked mechanism to imagine ways around and through seemingly intransigent social problems, such as class inequity, political violence, and sexual abuse.

An exploration of the history, ambitions, and impact of the Nobel Prize in literature as it gained a central position in 20th-century global literary culture. Few scholars would deny that the Nobel Prize is the most prestigious literary award in the world. But what mechanisms made it possible for 18 Swedish intellectuals to become the world's most influential literary critics? Paul Tenngart argues that the Nobel Prize in literature has become a special kind of international canonization: exerted from a non-central, semi-peripheral position, the award sometimes confirms and reinforces hierarchical relations between literary languages and cultures, and sometimes disturbs established patterns of dominance and dependence. Drawing from a wide range of contemporary theories and methods, this multifaceted history of the Nobel Prize questions how the Swedish Academy has managed to keep the prize's global status through all the violent international crises of the last 120 years; how the selection of laureates shaped the idea of 'universal' literary values and defined literary quality across languages and cultures; and what impact the prize has had on the distribution and significance of particular works, literatures and languages. The Nobel Prize and the Formation of Contemporary World Literature explores the history and impact of the Nobel Prize in literature from the first award in 1901 through recent controversies involving Bob Dylan and #MeToo, arguing that the prize is a unique performative act that has been – and still is – central in our continual and collective construction of world literature.

In this English translation and revision of her acclaimed German-language book, Elke Sturm-Trigonakis expands on Goethe's notion of Weltliteratur (1827) to propose that, owing to globalization, literature is undergoing a profound change in process, content, and linguistic practice. Rather than producing texts for a primarily national readership, modern writers can collate diverse cultural, literary, and linguistic traditions to create new modes of expression that she designates as "hybrid texts." The author introduces an innovative framework to analyse these new forms of expression that is based on comparative cultural studies and its methodology of contextual (systemic and empirical) approaches to the study of literature and culture, including the concepts of the macro-and micro-systems of culture and literature. To illustrate her proposition, Sturm-Trigonakis discusses selected literary texts that exhibit characteristics of linguistic and cultural hybridity, the concept of "in-between," and transculturality and thus are located in a space of a "new world literature." Examples include Gastarbeiterliteratur ("migrant literature") by authors such as Chiellino, Shami, and Atabay. The book is important reading for philologists, linguists, sociologists, and other scholars interested in the cultural and linguistic impact of globalization on literature and culture. The German edition of this volume was originally published as Global playing in der Literatur. Ein Versuch über die Neue Weltliteratur (2007) and it has been translated in collaboration with the author by Athanasia Margoni and Maria Kaisar.

The Daughter's Return offers a close analysis of an emerging genre in African-American and Caribbean fiction produced by women writers who make imaginative returns to their ancestral pasts. Considering some of the defining texts of contemporary fiction--Toni Morrison's Beloved, Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, and Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven--Rody discusses their common inclusion of a daughter who returns to the site of her people's founding trauma of slavery through memory or magic. Rody treats these texts as allegorical expressions of the desire of writers newly emerging into cultural authority to reclaim their difficult inheritance, and finds a counter plot of heroines' encounters with women of other racial and ethnic groups running through these works.

A landmark survey of disenfranchised literary voices and the forces that seek to silence them—from the influential activist and author of Tell Me a Riddle. With this groundbreaking work, Olsen revolutionized the study of literature by shedding critical light on the writings of marginalized women and working-class people. From the excavated testimony of authors’ letters and diaries, Olsen shows us the many ways the creative spirit, especially in those disadvantaged by gender, class, or race, has been suppressed through the years. Olsen recounts the torments of Herman Melville, the shame that brought Willa Cather to a dead halt, and the struggles of Olsen’s personal heroine Virginia Woolf, the greatest exemplar of a writer who confronted the forces that worked to silence her. First published in 1978, Silences expanded the literary canon and the ways readers engage with literature. This 25th-anniversary edition includes Olsen’s classic reading lists of forgotten authors and a new introduction. Bracing and prescient, Silences remains “of primary importance to those who want to understand how art is generated or subverted and to those trying to create it themselves” (Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review). “A valuable book, an angry book, a call to action.” —Maxine Hong Kingston “Silences helped me to keep my sanity many a day.” —Gloria Naylor, author of Mama Day “[Silences is] ‘the Bible.’ I constantly return to it.” —Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street “Silences will, like A Room of One’s Own, be quoted where there is talk of the circumstances in which literature is possible.” —Adrienne Rich, author of Diving into the Wreck

This much-needed guide to translated literature offers readers the opportunity to hear from, learn about, and perhaps better understand our shrinking world from the perspective of insiders from many cultures and traditions. In a globalized world, knowledge about non-North American societies and cultures is a must. Contemporary World Fiction: A Guide to Literature in Translation provides an overview of the tremendous range and scope of translated world fiction available in English. In so doing, it will help readers get a sense of the vast world beyond North America that is conveyed by fiction titles from dozens of countries and language traditions. Within the guide, approximately 1,000 contemporary non-English-language fiction titles are fully annotated and thousands of others are listed. Organization is primarily by language, as language often reflects cultural cohesion better than national borders or geographies, but also by country and culture. In addition to contemporary titles, each chapter features a brief overview of earlier translated fiction from the group. The guide also provides in-depth bibliographic essays for each chapter that will enable librarians and library users to further explore the literature of numerous languages and cultural traditions.