- World literature
World literature refers to literature from all over the world, including
African literature ,Arabic literature ,American literature ,Asian literature ,European literature ,Latin American literature , etc.History
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe introduced the concept of "Weltliteratur" in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations, including translations fromSanskrit ,Islam ic andSerbia nepic poetry .Karl Marx andFriedrich Engels used the term in their "Communist Manifesto " (1848) to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production.Although anthologies of "world literature" have often used the term to market a largely European canon, the past three decades have given rise to a much more expansive conception of literary interest and value. Recent books such as David Damrosch's "What Is World Literature?", for instance, define world literature as a category of literary production, publication and circulation, rather than using the term evaluatively. Arguably, this is closer to the original sense of the term in
Goethe andMarx .World literature is conceptually similar to
world cinema , world art andworld music .See also
*
Classic book
*Comparative literature
*Literature by country
*List of world folk-epics
*History of literature
*Print culture
*Translation Further reading
*"The Norton Anthology of World Literature", 6 vols., second edition, 2001-2003.
*David Damrosch, "What Is World Literature?", Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
*Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (editors), "Poems for the Millennium: a Global Anthology of Modern & Postmodern Poetry", Berkeley: University of California Press, two vols., 1995, 1998.External links
*dmoz|Arts/Literature/World_Literature/
* [http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/ World Literature Forum] - world literature community
* [http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ Words Without Borders] - world literature magazine
* [http://students.surrey.sfu.ca/arts/wl World Literature Program at SFU] - World Literature Program at SFU
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