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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 , and so on. Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe introduced the concept of ''Weltliteratur'' in 1827 to describe the growing availability of texts from other nations. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the term in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 to describe the "cosmopolitan character" of bourgeois literary production.

Today, the term "world literature" is often used to denote the supposedly . Recent books such as David Damrosch's ''What Is World Literature?'' 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 and Marx .

World literature is conceptually similar to World Cinema and World Music .

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.

  • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, ''Manifesto of the Communist Party,'' 1848.

  • 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.



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