Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures: (Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures)

This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In nine case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contexts—such as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, multilingual regions in Spain, West Africa, and the Caribbean—the volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practice and demonstrates how vernaculars operate within different literary, critical, cultural, and political circumstances. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

Table of Contents:
Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Series Introduction – The Cosmopolitan-Vernacular Dynamic: Conjunctions of World Literature Helena Bodin (Stockholm University, Sweden), Stefan Helgesson (Stockholm University, Sweden), Christina Kulberg (Uppsala University, Sweden), Paul Tenngart (Lund University, Sweden), and Helena Wulff (Stockholm University, Sweden) Introduction: Theorizing the Vernacular Christina Kullberg and David Watson (Uppsala University, Sweden) 1. Contextualizing the Vernacular: Signposts from African Language, Writing, and Literature Moradewun Adejunmobi (University of California Davis, USA) 2. Vernacular Resistance: Catalan, Basque, and Galician Opposition to Francoist Monolingualism Christian Claesson (Lund University, Sweden) 3. The Modern Adventures of Kanian Poongundranar, Classical Tamil Poet: Reflections on Literatures of the World, Vernacularly Speaking S. Shankar (University of Hawai’i, USA) 4. Vernacular Soundings: Poetry from the Lesser Antilles in the Aftermaths of Hurricanes Irma and Maria Christina Kullberg (Uppsala University, Sweden) 5. From Fesiten to Fesibuku: Shifting Priorities in the Saamaka Vernacular Richard Price and Sally Price (College of William and Mary, USA) 6. Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in Modern Chinese Fiction and Lao She’s Satirical Novel Cat Country Lena Rydholm (Uppsala University, Sweden) 7. Worldly Themes and Vernacular Literature: Aino Kallas on Gender, Ethnicity, and Class Katarina Leppänen (Gothenburg University, Sweden) 8. Specters of the Vernacular: Neoliberalism, World Literature, and Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings David Watson (Uppsala University, Sweden) 9. Vernacular Imagination and Exophone Reconfiguration in Francophone Chinese Diasporic Literature Shuangyi Li (Lund University, Sweden) Vernacular Lessons: Dante, Cavafy, Gombrowicz (Instead of an Afterword) Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University, UK) Index

About the Author :
Christina Kullberg is Professor of French literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, and author of The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives: Exploring the Self and the Environment (2013). She is on the steering committee of the research program Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature. David Watson is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Uppsala University, Sweden.

Review :
An important intervention in the current debate on world literature. This engaging volume, starting from the premise that the cosmopolitan and the vernacular are complementary rather than opposed to one another, studies how the often tangled relationship region/nation/world plays out in a number of literatures around the world. The interaction of languages that travel and those that stay home, and the cultural choices that follow, have profoundly influenced literatures, from epics to novels; politics, from empires to nations; and much else. This rich collection of essays is the first to address these problems for global modernity. It deserves to be warmly welcomed and widely studied.