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  • Chapter 1 - Introduction

  • Edited by Ato Quayson, Stanford University, California, Jini Kim Watson, New York University
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to the City in World Literature
    Published online:
    13 July 2023
    Print publication:
    27 July 2023, pp 1-14

  • Summary

    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.