Christopher Prendergast 
Debating World Literature 

In the continuing debates about the cultural dimensions of globalization, the question of ‘literature’ has been something of a poor relation. This volume seeks to redress the balance. It takes as its starting point Goethe’s idea of
Weltliteratur, from which it then travels out to various parts of the globe at different historical junctures. Among its many concerns are the legacies of Goethe’s idea, variable understandings of the term ‘literature’ itself, cross-cultural encounters, the nature of ‘small literatures’, and the cultural politics of literary genres. With contributions from many of the leading voices in the field,
Debating World Literature seeks to transcend the pieties and simplifications of polemic in a search for the complexity embodied in the linking of the two terms ‘world’ and ‘literature’.

About the author

Stanley Corngold is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is translator and editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Metamorphosis, author of Lambent Traces: Franz Kafka, Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form, Complex Pleasure: Forms of Feeling in German Literature, The Fate of the Self: German Writers and French Theory, and Thomas Mann, 1875-1955. He is the recipient of Literary Paternity, Literary Friendship: Essays in Honor of Stanley Corngold.