In a globalised age where people, goods and cultural products transcend the boundaries of geography and temporality as never before, it is only natural that literary and cultural studies turn their attention to Goethe's nineteenth-century notion of aWeltliteratur. Offering their own twenty-first-century perspectives - across generations, nationalities and disciplines, the contributors to this anthology explore the idea of world literature for what it may add of new connections and itineraries to the study of literature and culture today.
Covering a vast historical material from witness accounts of the fall of Constantinople to Hari Kunzru's contemporary representations of multicultural London, these essays, by a diverse group of scholars, examine the pioneers of world literature (Juan Andrés Morell, Goethe and Hugo Meltzl), and the roles played by translation, migration and literary institutions in the circulation and reception of both national and cosmopolitan literatures. They illustrate how literary analysis can be enriched by attention to the border-crossing itineraries followed by migrants, writers, publishers, translators and texts; thereby yielding new discoveries about writers and artists such as Catullus, Manuel Vicent, Jean-Luc Godard, Dubravka Ugrešić, Derek Walcott, Cabral do Nascimento, Thomas Pynchon, Asger Jorn and Louis Paul Boon.