Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Series
  3. Cambridge Studies in World Literature

World literature is a vital part of twenty-first century literary studies. As an exciting field that engages with the place and function of literary studies in our global era, the study of world literature invites new methods, textual archives, and critical approaches. Cambridge Studies in World Literature highlights scholarship on literary works that circulate within and across multiple literary cultures and technologies of the textual. Our authors explore histories of empire, exile, migration, colonialism, and cosmopolitanism and the relevance of these to our contemporary world. While acknowledging the importance of the nation as an organizing principle in literary history, works in this Series experiment with regional and transregional cartographies - the hemispheric, the oceanic, the multi-local, the archipelagic, the contiguous - that in turn generate new comparative models. Comparative histories of forms and genres illuminate patterns of exchange, influence, and transformation across vast continental swathes. The Series highlights entanglements and frictions that inhere at the intersection of language worlds from both the global south and the global north, and multi-world models of literary production and literary criticism that these generate. It seeks to challenge historical, methodological, and cartographic boundaries, and to foreground humanistic and literary endeavors in the face of environmental and humanitarian catastrophes.

  • General Editors: Debjani Ganguly, Harvard University, Massachusetts, Francesca Orsini, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Refine search

Refine search

Content type:
Publication date:
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

12 results in Cambridge Studies in World Literature

Modernism, Existentialism, and the Aesthetics of the Postcolony
  • Toral Jatin Gajarawala
  • Published online:
    24 July 2026
    Print publication:
    20 August 2026
  • How did writers reimagine self and nation in the postcolonial moment? After the brutalities of partition and the triumph of Independence, decolonization in South Asia unfolded in a dramatic sense of disillusion and alienation. In this transnational study, Toral Gajarawala explores the cultural afterlife of decolonization in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and its profound moment of existential reckoning. In new genres and forms, artists registered a growing sense of estrangement from nation and nationalism, and crafted a new aesthetic landscape. This book reconsiders modernism in the subcontinent, charting the unlikely affiliations and aesthetic experiments it generated. Each chapter discusses a distinct artistic experiment- Hindi novels set in snow and ice, and a Pakistani painter's Paris moment; the existential novel of Bengal, and absurdist plays on famine and extinction- in light of key philosophical concepts of the moment: askesis, responsibility, commitment. The result is an illuminating microanalysis of the 1960s that reshapes our understanding of postcolonial aesthetics.

The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures
  • Xiaofan Amy Li
  • Published online:
    20 February 2026
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • The Aesthetics of Risk in Franco-East Asian Literatures is the first book that examines the concept of risk in non-anglophone world literature. Focusing on how risk is produced and reshaped by literary aesthetics, Li argues that risk is a creative rather than negative force in world literature. Instead of disaster narratives, Li approaches risk from the fresh perspective of ludic aesthetics, or playful, gamelike, illusionistic and experimental literary strategies. Comparatively analysing an original selection of texts by modern and contemporary French-Francophone and East Asian writers, each chapter focuses on a particular genre such as the novel, life-writing, poetry, and image-texts. The reimagination of risk in literature is revealed to be closely related to different forms of play such as structured games, masquerade, poetic and intermedial experimentation. Franco-East Asian literatures help us rethink risk in linguistically diverse and cross-cultural contexts, providing a new paradigm for comparative criticism and world literature.

Arab Nationalism, Decolonization and the Making of a Transregional Literature
  • Anne-Marie McManus
  • Published online:
    02 February 2026
    Print publication:
    05 March 2026
  • What makes Arabic literature, Arabic? Casting critical new light on area-based approaches, this comparative study tracks the diverse literary practices in Arabic and French that, during and after decolonization, writers on both sides of North Africa and the Middle East used to found a transregional literary system. Influenced by anti-colonial Arab nationalism, they mapped this literary system's imaginative and circulational scale according to the experience that they believed decolonial literature must represent and amplify: a shared political experience they called “Arab.” As it develops the first account of transregional scale between Morocco and Iraq, and between national and world literatures, this study shows that a major expression of twentieth-century Arabic literature produced itself as a set of print culture practices, literary themes, and interpretive norms in response to evolving ideas of Arab experience and emancipation.

The Indian Ocean and the Historical Imagination in Afro-Asian Fiction
  • Kritish Rajbhandari
  • Published online:
    19 December 2025
    Print publication:
    19 February 2026
  • The Indian Ocean has long connected people, objects, and ideas across continents and cultures. This book asks how contemporary writers reimagine the Indian Ocean through literary figurations of the past. In doing so, it offers an oceanic perspective for rethinking the paradigms of postcolonialism by way of rich historical context and intertextual readings of Afro-Asian fiction. Drawing on historiographical research, archival theory, and literary analysis, this book explores how writers including Amitav Ghosh, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sophia Mustafa, Ananda Devi, Shenaz Patel, and Barlen Pyamootoo imaginatively probe the historical and cultural legacies of transoceanic pasts within the political contradictions and identarian divisions of the postcolonial present. Traveling between South Asia and Eastern Africa and between the past and the present through literary, filmic, theoretical, and archival texts, this book contends that any understanding of South Asian or African present is incomplete without a consideration of their entangled pasts.

Five Economies of World Literature
  • Sandor Hites
  • Published online:
    09 December 2025
    Print publication:
    19 January 2026
  • Five Economies of World Literature is a comprehensive revision of nineteenth-century conceptualizations of 'world literature' in view of their intersections with economic thought. The book demonstrates that with a routinized identification of world literature as the cultural manifestation of modern capitalism, recent discussions have lost sight of an important historical and conceptual dynamic. Based on reinterpretations of the work of Goethe, Thomas Carlyle, Fichte, Hugó von Meltzl, and Marx, the chapters center on five economic notions (free trade, the gift, central planning, protectionism, and common ownership) that have shaped the theory and praxis of transnational exchange. At a time of profound reconfigurations in global political, cultural, and economic landscapes, this analysis deepens our historical understanding of cross-cultural encounters and also offers a better grasp of many of our current concerns about the globalization of cultural production and consumption.

V. S. Naipaul and World Literature
  • Vijay Mishra
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • V. S. Naipaul is a major and controversial figure in postcolonial and world literature. This book provides a challenging and uncompromisingly honest study that engages with history, genre theory, aesthetics, and global literary culture, with close reference to Naipaul's published and archival material. In his fiction and creative histories, the definition of the modern idea of world literature is informed by the importance of an artistic ordering of perception. Although often expressing ideas that are prejudicial and morally repugnant, there is an honesty in his writings where one finds extraordinary insights into how life is experienced within colonial structures of power. These colonial structures provided no abstract unity to the field of literary expression and ignored vernacular cultures. The book argues that a universal ideology of the aesthetic, transcending time, regions, and languages, provides world literature with a unity which is possible only within a critical universal humanism attuned to heroic readings of texts and cultures.

Colonialism, World Literature, and the Making of the Modern Culture of Letters
  • Baidik Bhattacharya
  • Published online:
    19 January 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • In a radical and ambitious reconceptualization of the field, this book argues that global literary culture since the eighteenth century was fundamentally shaped by colonial histories. It offers a comprehensive account of the colonial inception of the literary sovereign – how the realm of literature was thought to be separate from history and politics – and then follows that narrative through a wide array of different cultures, multilingual archives, and geographical locations. Providing close studies of colonial archives, German philosophy of aesthetics, French realist novels, and English literary history, this book shows how colonialism shaped and reshaped modern literary cultures in decisive ways. It breaks fresh ground across disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, history, and philosophy, and invites one to rethink the history of literature in a new light.

Persianate Verse and the Poetics of Eastern Internationalism
  • Samuel Hodgkin
  • Published online:
    14 December 2023
    Print publication:
    21 December 2023
  • At the height of literary nationalisms in the twentieth century, leftist internationalists from Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, India, and the Soviet East bonded over their shared love of the classical Persian verses of Hafiz and Khayyam. At writers' congresses and in communist literary journals, they affirmed their friendship and solidarity with lyric ghazals and ruba'iyat. Persianate poetry became the cultural commons for a distinctively Eastern internationalism, shaping national literatures in the Soviet Union, the Middle East, and South Asia. By the early Cold War, the literary entanglement between Persianate culture and communism had established models for cultural decolonization that would ultimately outlast the Soviet imperial project. In the archive of literature produced under communism in Persian, Tajik, Dari, Turkish, Uzbek, Azerbaijani, Armenian, and Russian, this book finds a vital alternative to Western globalized world literature.

China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century African Literature
  • Duncan M. Yoon
  • Published online:
    01 June 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023
  • China in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century African Literature unpacks the long-standing complexity of exchanges between Africans and Chinese as far back as the Cold War and beyond. This scope encompasses how China, which emerged as a main engine of the world economy by the end of the twentieth century, has transformed patterns of globalization across the continent. In this ground-breaking work on cultural representations, Duncan M. Yoon examines the controversial symbol of China in African literature. He reads acclaimed authors like Kofi Awoonor, Henri Lopes, and Bessie Head, as well as contemporary writers, including Ufrieda Ho, Kwei Quartey, and Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor. Each chapter focuses on a genre such as poetry, detective fiction, memoir, and the novel, drawing out themes like resource extraction, diaspora, gender, and race. Yoon demonstrates how African creative voices grapple with and make meaning out of the possibilities and limitations of globalization in an increasingly multipolar world.

Reorienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry
  • Levi Thompson
  • Published online:
    24 November 2022
    Print publication:
    08 December 2022
  • Re-orienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry is the first book to systematically study the parallel development of modernist poetry in Arabic and Persian. It presents a fresh line of comparative inquiry into minor literatures within the field of world literary studies. Focusing on Arabic-Persian literary exchanges allows readers to better understand the development of modernist poetry in both traditions and in turn challenge Europe's position at the center of literary modernism. The argument contributes to current scholarly efforts to globalize modernist studies by reading Arabic and Persian poetry comparatively within the context of the Cold War to establish the Middle East as a significant participant in wider modernist developments. To illuminate profound connections between Arabic and Persian modernist poetry in both form and content, the book takes up works from key poets including the Iraqis Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and the Iranians Nima Yushij, Ahmad Shamlu, and Forough Farrokhzad.

The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature
  • Sarah M. Quesada
  • Published online:
    14 July 2022
    Print publication:
    04 August 2022
  • The African Heritage of Latinx and Caribbean Literature unearths a buried African archive within widely-read Latinx writers of the last fifty years. It challenges dominant narratives in World Literature and transatlantic studies that ignore Africa's impact in broader Latin American culture. Sarah Quesada argues that these canonical works evoke textual memorials of African memory. She shows how the African Atlantic haunts modern Latinx and Caribbean writing, and examines the disavowal or distortion of the African subject in the constructions of national, racial, sexual, and spiritual Latinx identity. Quesada shows how themes such as the 19th century 'scramble for Africa,' the decolonizing wars, Black internationalism, and the neoliberal turn are embedded in key narratives. Drawing from multilingual archives about West and Central Africa, she examines how the legacies of colonial French, Iberian, British and U.S. Imperialisms have impacted on the relationships between African and Latinx identities. This is the first book-length project to address the African colonial and imperial inheritance of Latinx literature.

South Asian Writers, Latin American Literature, and the Rise of Global English
  • Roanne Kantor
  • Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022
  • Ever since T.B. Macaulay leveled the accusation in 1835 that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India,' South Asian literature has served as the imagined battleground between local linguistic multiplicity and a rapidly globalizing English. In response to this endless polemic, Indian and Pakistani writers set out in another direction altogether. They made an unexpected journey to Latin America. The cohort of authors that moved between these regions include Latin-American Nobel laureates Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz; Booker Prize notables Salman Rushdie, Anita Desai, Mohammed Hanif, and Mohsin Hamid. In their explorations of this new geographic connection, Roanne Kantor claims that they formed the vanguard of a new, multilingual world literary order. Their encounters with Latin America fundamentally shaped the way in which literature written in English from South Asia exploded into popularity from the 1980s until the mid-2000s, enabling its global visibility.