Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures

This open access book complicates and develops the notion of the vernacular. Understood in the linguistic sense as well as an element of the local, the vernacular facilitates the exploration of local and global dynamics. Through exploring the unexamined active role of the local, the indigenous, and the periphery in international literary exchanges, this volume argues that a coherent theorization of the vernacular will enable us to do so. The essays in Vernaculars in an Age of World Literatures present new critical approaches in the debate on world literature, which has given priority to cosmopolitan movements, global circulation of literatures, and metropolitan centers. In nine case studies, approaching narratives from the long 20th century from more or less marginal contexts—such as the Francophone Chinese diaspora, multilingual regions in Spain, West Africa, and the Caribbean—the volume offers theoretical and methodological ways of putting the concept of the vernacular in practice and demonstrates how vernaculars operate within different literary, critical, cultural, and political circumstances.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

An important intervention in the current debate on world literature. This engaging volume, starting from the premise that the cosmopolitan and the vernacular are complementary rather than opposed to one another, studies how the often tangled relationship region/nation/world plays out in a number of literatures around the world., The interaction of languages that travel and those that stay home, and the cultural choices that follow, have profoundly influenced literatures, from epics to novels; politics, from empires to nations; and much else. This rich collection of essays is the first to address these problems for global modernity. It deserves to be warmly welcomed and widely studied.

Christina Kullberg is Professor of French literature at Uppsala University, Sweden, and author of The Poetics of Ethnography in Martinican Narratives: Exploring the Self and the Environment (2013). She is on the steering committee of the research program Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literature.David Watson is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Uppsala University, Sweden.