Böcker av Stefan Helgesson

This open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples todescribe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case. Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of 'cosmopolitan' and 'vernacular' - or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization - which provide an overall structure to the analysis of literature and literary phenomena. In this way, the authors show that the semi-periphery is an ideal point of departure to further the understanding of world literature, because it is a place where the cosmopolitan (the literary universal) and the vernacular (the rootedness in a particular culture or place) interact in ways that have not yet been thoroughly explored.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of 'world' and 'globe' concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One - 'Worlds in Texts' - to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two - 'Texts in Worlds' - the concerns of these nine chapters range from multilingualism, genre and style to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. With this focus on practice - which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa and India - contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

This open access book explores literary works and practices - always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations - in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures. These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions - including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific - are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic.The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library. This book sets out to understand how the meaning of 'literature' was transformed in the Global South in the post-1945 era.