The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature - (New Horizons in Contemporary Writing) (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

On what terms and concepts can we ground the comparative study of Anglophone literatures and cultures around the world today? What, if anything, unites the novels of Witi Ihimaera, the speculative fiction of Nnedi Okorafor, the life-writings by Stuart Hall, and the emerging Anglophone Arab literature by writers like Omar Robert Hamilton?
This volume explores the globality of Anglophone fiction both as a conceptual framing and as a literary imaginary. It highlights the diversity of lives and worlds represented in Anglophone writing, as well as the diverse imaginations of transnational connections articulated in it.
Featuring a variety of internationally renowned scholars, this book thinks through Anglophone literature not as a problematic legacy of colonial rule or as exoticizing commodity in a global literary marketplace but examines it as an inherently transcultural literary medium. Contributors provide new insights into how it facilitates the articulation of divergent experiences of modernity and the critique of hierarchies and inequalities within, among, and beyond post-colonial societies.

Review Quotes

"The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature has a broad potential appeal. The intellectual sophistication of its contributors and the impressive breadth of sources and traditions under their command offer practical value for readers interested not only in global networks of culture, literature, and language, but also in the several voyages of vital, complex, and well-traveled scholarly traditions as they likewise intermingle and relate, translate, to-and-fro." --Intelligence

"The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature succeeds in presenting Anglophone writing as a site of transcultural engagement that is neither reducible to colonial history nor to market globalization. The volume's geographic reach ... resists the gravitational pull of the West as sole point of triangulation. At the same time, it remains attentive to the structural inequalities that shape literary circulation and reception." --Knowledge Commons

"The volume showcases the productivity of a transcultural approach in contemporary English literary studies ... This new paradigm not only complicates the traditional understanding of local knowledge and global frames by regarding them as mutual encounters, but also provides profound insights for reading world literature both in and beyond English." --Forum for Modern Language Studies

"I would [...] like to underscore the utility of The Many Worlds of Anglophone Literature for those working with fiction, documentary, and life writing, and archival and legal documents. The editors of this volume have thus provided an excellent reference work for scholars to engage with decolonial practices, reflect on new anglophone writing, and build upon Schulze-Engler's critical vocabularies around transculturality." --Journal of Postcolonial Writing

"The intellectual sophistication of [this book's] contributors and the impressive breadth of sources and traditions under their command offer practical value for readers interested not only in global networks of culture, literature, and language, but also in the several voyages of vital, complex, and well-traveled scholarly traditions as they likewise intermingle and relate, translate, to-and-fro." --Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association

About the Author

Silvia Anastasijevic is a doctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt and a research assistant at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Magdalena Pfalzgraf is Junior Professor of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Bonn, Germany.
Hanna Teichler is a postdoctoral researcher at Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany.