This chapter begins with outlining the repeated appeal from non-Indigenous Australians to share in the heritage of First Nations people without recognition of the ongoing impact of colonialism. It argues that one devastating consequence was the loss or endangering of many first languages of Australia. The chapter considers the relationship between poetry, language and Country, described by Alexis Wright as ‘library land’. Foregrounding the immeasurable significance of these archives of land and lived cultural practice, the chapter details the differences between Aboriginal oral traditions and the translation of Indigenous song poetry into a written context. Aboriginal women’s poetry of mourning and lament, milkarri, is discussed, the chapter pointing out that the power of such songs remains with those to whom the songs belong and the Country that has created the songs. It turns attention to attempted translations of Aboriginal song into English by Eliza Dunlop and then more contemporary translations of Indigenous oral traditions, such as John Bradley’s bilingual book co-authored by Yanuwa families, Stuart Cooke’s translation of Kimberley song cycles, and the Queensland University Press bilingual anthologies of Aboriginal song cycles. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the translation history of the Moon Bone cycle.

This chapter puts world literature and African print cultures into conversation by exploring a widely circulating tale of desire, deception and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and then spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The Palm-Wine Drinkard brought the folktale known as the ‘complete gentleman’ story to an international audience in 1952, but the scale of this narrative phenomenon was already massive. Since 1860, more than 450 versions have been printed in over a hundred languages across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The story also inspired dozens of adaptations across a variety of media, including many by renowned creative writers. This chapter explores what this traveling tale can teach the study of world literatures and African print cultures. It includes an overview of the phenomenon, a discussion of methodology, and an analysis of adaptations by Amos Tutuọla, Efua Sutherland and Ousmane Socé.

If commodities furnish the backgrounds of literary texts, they are far from trivial details. The cups of tea in Austen, the calico curtains in Gaskell, the lumps of coal in Dickens: each of these objects speaks to us about the material worlds in which texts circulate. While some commodities feature as elements of the setting, included for the purposes of realism, others play a more active role in literary narratives by driving the desires of characters and the trajectories of plots. The pursuit of whale oil, for example, motivates the events of Moby-Dick, just as ivory and opium shape those of Heart of Darkness and Sea of Poppies, respectively. Yet whether commodities appear as background details or as protagonists in their own right, their presence invites us to connect the desires and domestic intimacies detailed in the text to the wider networks of production and circulation that frame them.

As a material and literary world, the Silk Road ‘reorients’ our maps of both global capitalism and world literature. The commodities that circulated along the Silk Road included not only objects such as silks, leather, pottery, spices, silver and paper, but also artisans and courtesans, foods and cuisines, languages and knowledges, ideas, ideologies, texts and cultural institutions. This chapter explores the connections between world literature and Silk Road commodities, focusing on the global cultures of tea and specifically the literary culture of the teahouse, which it reads as a precursor to the coffeehouse of early modern literary culture. The history of tea’s origins and proliferation, and of its production and consumption as well as attendant technologies, material cultures, rituals and spaces, allows us to track its movement from the Silk Road to Europe, specifically through the rise and development of teahouses and the intercultural dialogues facilitated by the practice of tea consumption. Bringing together examples of tea poetry in Chinese, Japanese, Moroccan-Arabic and Sufi literatures this chapter shows how tea is a staple feature of fictional worlds across connected literary cultures. In doing so, it explores the broader potential for using the commodity cultures of the Silk Road as a framework for literary study in a global context.

The introduction makes the case that while theatre has tended to be ignored or marginalised in modernist studies, it deserves a central place in accounts of modernism alongside poetry, prose, cinema, and the visual arts. It further contends that while there is an impressive variety amongst its practitioners, the hallmarks of modernist theatre are antagonism and provocation. Indeed, modernist theatre-makers rebelled against dominant genres, conventions, institutions, and audiences by creating new artistic forms and advocating for different values and worldviews. In so doing, this chapter argues that scholars need to go beyond the usual Euro-American cultures to consider how modernist theatre was manifested in the wider world and to recalibrate the historical trajectory of modernism that such broader geographies demand.

This chapter opens with a literary history of armed conflicts in the Global South, and the violent suppression of these conflicts in the name of national security in India, Nigeria, Burma and the Middle East. Situated between the world literature debate and the vernacular turn within Anglophone literary criticism, the chapter develops disruptive (ir)realism as an analytical frame, one that accounts for the multiple modalities of violence in literary texts from the Global South. The chapter traces these modalities to the violent trajectories of insurgent lifeworlds through disruptive plots, mobile narrators, botched syntax, and alternating and collapsing timelines. Such tropes of disruption, the chapter reveals, are inflected in both the aesthetic configuration of insurgent figures who lack a guiding narrative anchor, and the uneven distribution of violence among fictional communities that results in further sociopolitical cleavages. The implied move toward post-terrorism in this chapter gestures toward the social (re)distribution of violence through myriad figures: rogues, rebels, guerillas, bandits, revolutionaries, and, most importantly, insurgents.

Can a poem create a world? Among other poets, Wallace Stevens affirms a poem's capacity to make a mountain or even a planet. This chapter examines the history behind the idea of the poem as worldmaking, from Renaissance ideas rooted in antiquity, through Enlightenment concepts such as heterocosm, to modernist ideas of autonomy, including W. H. Auden's “secondary worlds.” Allowing for subsequent historicist, political, and poststructuralist critiques of such ideas, it argues for the enduring value of the concept of poem as worldmaking. Some theorists of lyric have advanced a notion of the poem as a ritualistic event of enunciation and others have held that the poem, even if not primarily mimetic, still evokes a world. This chapter argues for a synthetic model of the poem as enacting an event in language and as also producing a polyspatial, polytemporal world, as exemplified by poems by Patience Agbabi, Margaret Atwood, Tracy K. Smith, and others. Drawing on the field of world literature, it explores how the poem's transnational and transhistorical travel worlds the world. Analyzing a poem by A. K. Ramanujan, it asks about the ethical implications of a poem's worldwide reach.

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 1 argues that V. S. Naipaul’s works are critically co-extensive with world literary formations and demonstrably foundational to the conception of the modern idea of world literature. Naipaul’s entry into world literature is via a writing that reads the literary world as an aesthetic totality. Kant’s critique of judgement is critical here even if Naipaul departs from Kant who read human cognition as discursive and not intuitive. Naipaul’s aesthetics is grounded in an intuitive mode of human cognition. His idea of “seeing” (and here he means “critical seeing”) via a “sensible intuition” is the basis of all his writings. Naipaul’s declaration of the primacy of the intuitive intellect – Proust is cited as exemplary – in the artistic process has no need for concepts or guiding principles, a prior idea or even a politics. However, Naipaul heeds Kant’s warning that if we were to rely purely on intuition – which would generate a non-contingent world with no distinction between objects that are real and those merely possible because all objects for the intuitive intellect are real – there would be no universal concepts generated by understanding and only individual representations grasped directly and immediately.

My wager in this book is that the modern idea of the literary as a sovereign order of textuality since the late eighteenth century – autonomous, autotelic, and singular – was coproduced with an extraordinary model of colonial sovereignty in the far-flung colony of British India. I track the proliferation of this model of the literary sovereign then through the conceptual grid of Weltliteratur or world literature and show how this colonial history made its mark across literary cultures in Europe. From the eighteenth century onward, this colonial history shaped and reshaped literary cultures on a global scale, and laid the foundations of what can be defined as the modern culture of letters.

In Chapter 4, I discuss the idea of Weltliteratur and argue that it was one of the most successful tools through which Europe negotiated with and made sense of the colonial history of the literary sovereign. Though mostly associated with Goethe, its clearest outlines were available through a combination of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798). Weltliteratur, I argue, is the culmination of a set of ideas Kant introduced to account for the peculiar nature of the power of judgment or taste – that such judgments cannot have any a priori or universal principles and yet claim universality. Whether framed as the beautiful or the sublime, he suggested, such claims remained contingent, relying on a communal consensus that could have been established only according to anthropological principles. Kantian aesthetics is “impure” as it always and already relies on something external to it, that cannot be made sense of within the borders set by aesthetic judgment itself. Similarly, Weltliteratur was a combination of aesthetic and anthropological principles, advocating a form of comparative judgment replicating the Kantian model.

This chapter is a synchronic snapshot of the way that poems, speeches, sociability, and bureaucracy coalesced at Stalinist literary occasions. Here, literary representatives made their claims to representative authority and, on that basis, lent legitimacy to the multinational state and the international revolutionary project. The chapter follows the Iranian émigré poet Abu al-Qasim Lahuti through his performances at three multinational and international events over the course of 1934–1935: the First Soviet Writers’ Congress in Moscow; the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris; and Stalin’s Kremlin meeting with Tajik and Turkmen collective farmers at which the multinational “friendship of peoples” was declared. Lahuti’s exchanges at these events with writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, and André Gide contributed to the articulation of the role of the Eastern literary representative and the ceremonial of authoritarian mass politics in the Soviet Union and beyond. As Persianate forms left their traditional contexts and entered this Russocentric world literature system, their utility as rhetorical tools for negotiating patron–poet power relations collapsed, and they came to be read in translation as simple flattery. This chapter thus presents Soviet multinational socialist realism as an illustrative early instantiation of institutionalized world literature.

The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.