Scholarship rarely, if ever, reads Mashreq transregionalism with Algerian literature in French, treating these corpuses as non-conversant at best – and silent enemies at worst. By identifying systems of interacting with texts as interpretive sensibilities, I move away from proper languages as the grounds for a historically troubled comparison. Instead, I investigate differing understandings of polysemy in these two literary systems. Poststructuralist reading methods, which emerged in tandem with Maghrebi literatures after decolonization and remain predominant in academic literary studies, valorize polysemy as a sign of emancipatory reading. In contrast, Mashreq transregionalists associated ambiguities of reading with coercive, state-supported hermeneutics that deprive readers of interpretive autonomy. Drawing on critical essays, calls for print reform, and an interview with Youssef, this chapter outlines a new comparative method for literatures across Maghreb and Mashreq, French and Arabic, founded in plural interpretive sensibilities, or systems of interacting with texts.

This chapter introduces the anti-colonial ideology of Arab nationalism, which in its popular form established a transregional culture of resistance to oppression and injustice. Progressive writers of the decolonization generation, the author shows, mapped their new literary system’s imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed it must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” The chapter then discusses the key concepts of Arab scale and transregionalism. It outlines their nuanced entanglements between national and world literatures, and notes the significance of embedded, internal scales that texture and differentiate the system under study. Overall, the chapter argues that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.

The introduction sets out the central question and critical framework of this book. It presents the debates around the book’s three keywords: risk, play and Franco–East Asian literatures. It proposes a new comparative reading of world literature that is not based on canonicity, the global circulation of literature via English translations or identity categories.

The Coda foregrounds the literary implications of the book’s argument by reflecting on the idea of the Indian Ocean as a comparative literary space. Through an example from Yvonne Owuor’s The Dragonfly Sea (2019), it illustrates a comparative practice wherein the historical, the geopolitical, and the literary come together. The mutual imbrication of the geopolitical and the literary in contemporary Afro-Asian fiction generates the Indian Ocean as a space of comparison where historical relationalities become legible within the exigencies of the present.

The Introduction tackles biases and lacunae in recent discussions about the effects of economic globalization on the world-literary circulation of texts. I highlight three arguments (Ph. Cheah, A. Mufti, E. Apter) that dismiss world literature as a procedure of exchange for surrendering to “neoliberal global capitalism” and confront them with the observation that even the critique of this systemic correlation loses sight of spaces other than that of the Euro-Atlantic world system (D. Ganguly, F. Orsini). Against this background, the Introduction claims that the political economy of world literature offers a more complex picture even within the confines of European capitalist modernity if we recognize the diversity of economic discourses surrounding its early theories. First, I attempt to historicize and diversify the notion of “the economy” by addressing semantic oscillations in the notions of ecology, circulation, and commerce. Then I outline the five “designs of circulation” the individual chapters will address and make preliminary suggestions about their pre-, non-, or anti-capitalist elements.

This book on the language of love’s joy starts with the acknowledgement that such a language has repeatedly been expressed as impossible. The poetic and vernacular tradition of joie d’amour originates in the lyrics of the troubadours, which famously sing the absence of fulfilment in the endless prolongation of desire: it is thus born in a lyrical language that presupposes its impossibility. This study on the language of love’s joy is thus grounded in the paradox that love’s joy is beyond language. The elusive nature of the emotion has resulted in a lack of studies on love’s joy. If there is an important scholarly tradition on the semantics of Old Occitan joi, this critical interest has been confined to the French literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and has not been picked up by the field of emotion history nor by more recent studies on medieval love literature.

What sort of thing are the narratives of the life of Jesus, literarily speaking? (History? Biography? Fiction? Myth?) And what bearing does their genre have on the manner of interpretation proper to them? This chapter attends to Origen’s account of the Gospels’ genre, literary precedents, and relationship to other forms of ancient literature in order to establish why he believes the Gospels cannot be read as transparently historical narratives. Here, I propose that the kind of narratives Origen believes the Evangelists compose is directly comparable to the stories one finds throughout the scriptures of Israel. Furthermore, Origen also relates the Gospels’ literary similarity to Jewish biblical narrative to the way they both share a similarly complex relationship to facticity. The Gospels, in sum, all narrate the deeds, sufferings, and words of Jesus “under the form of history”; these historical narratives are of a mixed character, interweaving things that happened with things that didn’t and even couldn’t, with an eye toward presenting the events recorded to have happened to Jesus figuratively.

This chapter situates three Latinx literary organizations – CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets – in a trajectory of institution building dedicated to the support and development of Latinx poetry and poetics. Moving through organizational origins, concrete support strategies, founding members, and institutional alliances, the chapter maps out the practical as well as philosophical outcomes of developing Latinx poetry and poetics as a diverse, multiform set of voices. Coinciding with greater recognition of Latinx poets in terms of fellowship support, book prizes, and publication numbers, CantoMundo, Letras Latinas, and Undocupoets, as well as organizations that have built alongside and with them, have decisively shaped twenty-first-century Latinx poetry and given it many possible routes for future development.

Chapter 31 scrutinises the term Weltliteratur (world literature), often invoked but little understood. Weltliteratur is a motif in Goethe’s oeuvre, rather than a unified theory, and it either describes the increased international literary exchanges which are the result of modernisation, or it has a normative charge, suggesting that Weltliteratur enables intercultural understanding. The chapter considers the origins of and various sources for the concept, together with its key resonances and concerns; it also reflects on the role played by the term in the establishment of the modern academic discipline of comparative literature.

Chapter 3 explores colonial archives to unearth two models of comparatism – one diachronic or chronological and the other synchronic or territorial. The first model emerged from Jones’s works, both his translations and his speculative essays in Asiatick Researches, covering a broad range of subjects such as Indian chronology, astronomy, literary history, and so on. Along with this, and in explicit opposition, the second model was developed by colonial officials such as Brian H. Hodgson and W. W. Hunter through their copious comparative vocabularies: Hodgson’s numerous essays published in the Journal of the Asiatic Society after 1847 and Hunter’s A Comparative Dictionary of the Languages of India and High Asia, with a Dissertation (1868). The potential of these two phases was fully realized in the ambitious Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928) under the supervision of George Abraham Grierson. My claim in this chapter is that, with Grierson’s attempt to enumerate and describe modern Indian vernaculars, and his seamless mixing of colonial structures and linguistic knowledge in the survey, we encounter the full range of the comparative method for the first time.

In parallel with the establishment of English as an academic subject, Pater’s lifetime coincided with the institutionalisation of Modern Languages as an independent field of study within British universities. Pater’s contribution to the debate over a School of English at Oxford must therefore be understood in relation to his involvement with the Oxford School of Modern Languages and with the cultural and social space of the Taylorian Institution. In 1890, Pater was invited to contribute to the prestigious Taylor Lectures, which were designed to promote the study of modern European languages and literatures. The resulting lecture and essay, ‘Prosper Mérimée’, presents the French writer as a cosmopolitan and cultural mediator. After Pater’s death, the first series of Taylor lectures was collected in a volume entitled Studies in European Literature (1900). Reading the essay on Mérimée in the context of that volume enables us to see Pater as an advocate of a comparative approach to literature and as rejecting the nationalist mentality in which the rise of English in universities found itself implicated.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

This chapter comparatively probes the distinct trajectories of avant-garde poetics in Spanish America and Brazil from the postwar to the 1980s. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the rise of the Spanish American Vanguardias and Brazilian Modernismo, which adapted European experimental vocabularies to local contexts. Subsequently, a revival of the utopian avant-garde impulse developed into singular and divergent poetic forms of expression. This divergence can be clearly seen in, among other things, the preference in Brazil for synthetic forms and in Spanish America for the long poem. In other cases, the traditions converged in the adoption of an anti-lyrical stance, constructivist concerns, the use of long forms, and politically engaged poetry. From the 1970s on, the neo-baroque aesthetic also brought together figures from the entire region. This chapter looks at these divergences as well as points of confluence, seeking to understand how, in general, the reception of Surrealism and other poetic traditions led to a more “discursive,” personal poetry, and how the foregrounding of the materiality of language fueled synthetic, non-discursive forms.

Ernst Robert Curtius’s European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages remains a monumental achievement of postwar scholarship, whose vast scope – spanning a continent and more than a millennium – has kept it continuously relevant. However, its strangely atemporal view of literature, its treatment of medieval Latin as a medium (rather than a creative literature in its own right), and its peculiar structure have likewise been criticized since its publication. This essay argues that ELLMA’s virtues and faults are intertwined, and that both are inseparable from Curtius’s use of the psychoanalytic theories of C.G. Jung. Adapting Jung’s theories of archetypes and the stratified collective unconscious to literary study, Curtius reimagined medieval Latin as the collective unconscious of modern European literature. This boldly creative decision allowed him to achieve his goal: a reparative vision of a Europe forever unified through classical education.