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The introductory chapter explores the way attention to cities and urban literatures expands the typical nodes of World Literary production. It does so, we argue, by activating not just a broader spatial imaginary or geographical reach for the field, but multiplies the historical and linguistic formations of potential literary world systems. The chapter offers three starting propositions about World Literature: that it seeks literary frameworks beyond the nation; it tends toward systematicity and totality; and it activates an interest in decolonizing literary systems. Given that urban centers are typically highly networked at regional, national and global scales, we then consider the way cities have typically functioned as cultural “switchboards” regarding the commingling of peoples, cultures, goods and ideas. Instead of offering a singular new theory of World Literature to supersede previous ones, our volume proffers accounts of world-connecting circuitry that depends upon the complex dialectics of urban materialities and worldly imaginations.

This Element examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, when everyday information about faraway places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that news carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to regular readers beyond the dominant information poles, in the great port-cities of the South American Atlantic. Based on five case studies of typical turn-of-the-century foreign news, Lila Caimari shows how current events opened windows onto distant cities, feeding a new world horizon that was at once wider and eminently urban.

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Chapter 1 - Introduction

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Cities and News

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Chapter 1 - Introduction

Summary

Cities and News