Recoding World Literature

Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books

B. Venkat Mani

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780823273416, 9780823273409
• eBook ISBN: 9780823273423
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Library & Information Science
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association Winner, 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• Introduction: World Literature as a Pact with Books
• 1. Of Masters and Masterpieces: An Empire of Books, a Mythic European Library
• 2. Half Epic, Half Drastic: From a Parliament of Letters to a National Library
• 3. The Shadow of Empty Shelves: Two World Wars and the Rise and Fall of World Literature
• 4. Windows on the Berlin Wall: Unfinished Histories of World Literature in a Divided Germany
• 5. Libraries without Walls? World Literature in the Digital Century
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index