Recoding World Literature : Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books / B. Venkat Mani.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mani, B. Venkat, Author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Books and reading--Germany.

Books and reading.

Literature in libraries.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (359 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language AssociationWinner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies.From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of “bibliomigrancy”—the physical and virtual movement of books—Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves. Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation’s relationship with print culture—a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.Shifting current scholarship’s focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

Contents:

Recoding World Literature

Contents

Prologue

Introduction: World Literature as a Pact with Books

Chapter 1. Of Masters and Masterpieces: An Empire of Books, a Mythic European Library

Chapter 2. Half Epic, Half Drastic: From a Parliament of Letters to a National Library

Chapter 3. The Shadow of Empty Shelves: Two World Wars and the Rise and Fall of World Literature

Chapter 4. Windows on the Berlin Wall: Unfi nished Histories of World Literature in a Divided Germany

Chapter 5. Libraries without Walls? World Literature in the Digital Century

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

INDEX

Notes:

Title from eBook information screen..

Includes bibliographical references and index.

This eBook is made available Open Access under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2020)

ISBN:

0-8232-7343-1

OCLC:

962452215