Mapping Minor/Small and World Literatures

Periphery and Center

Yanli He, Nicholas Birns

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9781666944679
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Index: Social Sciences

Mapping Minor/Small and World Literatures: Periphery and Center makes a declarative intervention in debates about world literature, redefining the boundaries between the center and periphery to rejuvenate long-established assumptions about significance and insignificance. In this book, African American literature (emerging from the often overlooked pink periphery, a cramped space of minor literature), works from the Faroe Islands, Basque literature, First Nation Canadian literature, Western narratives about peripheral China, Kurdish literature, the ultraminor literary space of Antigua, the 'favela' of Brazilian literature, as well as the hyperlocal narratives of Australian and New Zealand literature are all studied for their meaningful role within the world literary system. Additionally, working-class writing and the literary contributions of individuals on the margins of their own societies are given a voice, ensuring that the world literary space does not merely represent the perspectives of dominant elites. Unlike other descriptions of world literature, which have frequently allowed the grandeur and breadth of the global to overshadow the imperative for authentic literary biodiversity, this anthology, featuring contributions from diverse scholars representing various countries and backgrounds, actively deconstructs the structures of power and domination inherent in Western-European-centered world literature, minor literature, and small literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: It Was Pink on the Map – Periphery and Central Literary Spaces of World Literature
• Part I: From Minor to Ultraminor Literary Space
• Chapter 1: Erasing the Pink on the World Atlas: Mapping African American Literature
• Chapter 2: A Cramped Space: Revisiting Minor Literature from a Decentered Center and Displaced Periphery
• Chapter 3: Ultraminor Nation and Literature: William Heinesen as a Nobel Prize Candidate from the Faroe Islands
• Part II: From Marginal, Regional, National to World Literary Space
• Chapter 4: Cultural Discontent in Basque Literature: A Geocritical Approach in Spanish Literature and World Literature
• Chapter 5: The Literary Space of Canadian Native Literature in Canadian Literature
• Chapter 6: From T-O Map to Big Game: Navigating the Journey of Asia, China, and Southwest China on the Western Atlas
• Chapter 7: Eurocentric Aestheticism, Reproducer of Western Symbolic Hegemony: Form-Politics Analysis in Ata Nahai’s Kurdish Novel Birds in Gale
• Part III: Hyperlocal Literary Space and the Global South
• Chapter 8: Delinquent Itinerary: Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in World Literature
• Chapter 9: Autobiographical Impulse and Peripheral Subjectivation in Carolina Maria de Jesus’s Diaries
• Chapter 10: The Hyperlocal and Conjectural Spaces of Australian and New Zealand Literatures in the World System
• Epilogue: A World in Which Nothing Is Pink on the Map – New Minor, Small, and World Literary Atlas
• About the Contributors