Literature A World History, Volumes 1-4

LITERATURE A WORLD HISTORY

An exploration of the history of the world’s literatures and the many varieties of literary expression

Literature: A World Historyencompasses all the world’s major literary traditions, emphasizing the interrelationship of local and national cultures over time. Spanning global literature from the beginnings of recorded history to the present day, this expansive four-volume set examines the many varieties of the world’s literatures in their social and intellectual contexts. Its four volumes are devoted to literature before 200 CE, from 200 to 1500, from 1500 to 1800, and from 1800 to 2000, with four dozen contributors providing new insights into the art of literature, and addressing the situation of literature in the world today.

Organized throughout in six broad regions—Africa, the Americas, East Asia, Europe, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, and West and Central Asia—Literature: A World History offers readers a clear and consistent treatment of diverse forms of literary expression across time and place. Throughout the text, particular emphasis is placed on literary institutions within different regional and linguistic cultures and on the relations between literature and a spectrum of social, political, and religious contexts.

• Features work by an international panel of leading scholars from around the globe, in Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and the United States
• Provides a balanced overview of national and global literature from all major regions of the world from antiquity to the present
• Highlights the specificity of regional and local cultures throughout much of literary history, together with cross-cutting essays on topics such as different writing systems, court cultures, and utopias

Literature: A World History is an invaluable reference work for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars looking for a wide-ranging overview of global literary history.

Series Editors

David Damrosch is Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature. He is the author or editor of twenty-five books, including What Is World Literature?, Comparing the Literatures, Around the World in 80 Books, and the six-volume Longman Anthology of World Literature. He has lectured in fifty countries around the world and his work has been translated into thirteen languages.

Gunilla Lindberg-Wada is Professor Emerita, Stockholm University. Her publications include a monograph and articles in English, Swedish, and Japanese on Japanese court poetry and fictional tales from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, on literary history writing, and on the Nordenskiöld Collection of Japanese Books. She received the Noma Award for the Translation of Japanese Literature in 1997.

Volume One Editor

Anders Pettersson is Professor Emeritus of Swedish and Comparative Literature, Umeå University, Sweden. His research interests focus on fundamental literary theory and transcultural literary history. He has published six monographs and edited or co-edited works including Literary History: Towards a Global Perspective and Notions of Literature across Times and Cultures.

Volume Two Editors

Bo Utas is Professor Emeritus of Iranian Studies, Uppsala University, Sweden. His research covers various aspects of Middle and New Iranian languages and literatures as well as religion and history as expressed in texts in these languages. He is a specialist in Persian manuscripts, Sufi texts, and Persian metrics.

Theo D’haen is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Leiden and University of Leuven. He is the author or editor of numerous publications, including World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, and Languages and Literatures in a Globalized World.

Volume Three Editor

Zhang Longxi is Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation, City University of Hong Kong. He has published more than twenty books and numerous articles in East-West comparative studies in both English and Chinese. His English books include Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West and From Comparison to World Literature.

Volume Four Editor

Djelal Kadir is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, Pennsylvania State University. He is the Founding President of the International American Studies Association and former Editor of the international quarterly World Literature Today. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Companion to World Literature, of Literary Cultures of Latin America, and of the Longman Anthology of World Literature.

Macroregional Editors

Eileen Julien (Africa) is Professor Emerita, Indiana University Bloomington. Among her publications are African Novels and the Question of Orality and Travels with Mae: Scenes from a New Orleans Girlhood. She is a recipient of Bunting Institute, Fulbright, and Guggenheim fellowships, and served as President of the African Literature Association and as founding Director of the West African Research Center.

Djelal Kadir (The Americas)

Asᶜad E. Khairallah (West and Central Asia) is Professor Emeritus of Arabic, Persian, and Comparative Literature, American University of Beirut, where he edited sixteen yearly volumes of the prestigious journal al-Abhath. He authored the monograph Love, Madness, and Poetry: An Interpretation of the Mağnūn Legend and numerous contributions to scholarly publications.

Anders Pettersson (Europe)

Harish Trivedi (South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania) was previously Professor of English at the University of Delhi, was visiting professor at the universities of Chicago and London, and at Istanbul, Beijing and Melbourne. He is the author of Colonial Transactions: English Literature and India (1993; rpt. 1995), and has co-edited Kipling in India: India in Kipling (2021); Literature and Nation: Britain and India 1800-1990 (2001); and Post-colonial Translation: Theory and Practice (1999). A festschrift for him, edited by Ruth Vanita, was published under the title India and the World: Postcolonialism, Translation and Indian Literature: Essays in Honour of Professor Harish Trivedi (Delhi: Pencraft, 2014).

Zhang Longxi (East Asia)

Contents

Full Table of Contents vii

Timeline xi

Contributors to Volume 1 lix

General Introduction: Literature, History, World lxiii

Anders Pettersson and David Damrosch, with the collective of editors

Reflections on the Idea of Literaturelxiii

About Literature: A World Historylxxviii

Introduction to Volume 1: The World before 200 ce 1

Anders Pettersson

1 East Asia7

Zhang Longxi, Bruce Fulton, and Gunilla Lindberg-Wada

Introduction: East Asia as a Region7

Chinese Literature9

Poetry in Pre-Qin China9

Prose Works in Pre-Qin China17

The Literature of the Han Dynasty20

The Literature of the Jian-an Period (196–220)27

2 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania30

Harish Trivedi, Harry Aveling, Teri Yamada, and Susan Najita

Introduction30

South Asia31

The Vedas, Brahmanas, and Upanishads 31

The Great Epics44

Collections of Tales48

Early Tamil Literature54

Southeast Asia57

Oceania58

3 Worlds Apart: Comparing Literary Traditions before the Global Age62

Wiebke Denecke

4 West and Central Asia 79

As ad E. Khairallah, David Damrosch, and Bo Utas

Introduction79

The Ancient Near East82

The Invention of Writing82

What Was Literature?87

The First Patron of Literature95

The Bible as Literature? 98

Iran101

5 Africa107

Karin Barber, Biodun Jeyifo, Eileen Julien, and Steve Vinson

Introduction107

Ancient Egypt 108

Language, Script, and “Literature”108

Ancient Egyptian Genres110

Orality 123

6 Writing Systems and Cultural Memory128

David Damrosch

7 Europe141

Anders Pettersson

Introduction141

Ancient Greece146

Greek Epic and Lyric Poetry146

Classical Greek Drama 157

Classical Greek Prose167

Literature in Greek, 300 bce–200 ce 174

Ancient Rome180

Latin Literature before 100 bce 180

First-century bce Latin Poetry and Prose184

Latin Literature during the First Two Centuries ce 201

Writing, Reading, and Literary Thought in Greco-Roman Culture206

Concluding Remarks: Greco-Roman Literary Culture in a Wider Perspective209

8 The Americas214

Djelal Kadir, Quentin Youngberg, Albert Braz, and Donatella Izzo

9 Literatures before 200 ce: Concluding Remarks222

Anders Pettersson

Full Table of Contents

Volume 1: Before 200 ce

Timeline xi

Contributors to Volume 1 lix

General Introduction: Literature, History, World lxiii

Introduction to Volume 1: The World before 200 ce 1

1 East Asia 7

2 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania30

3 Worlds Apart: Comparing Literary Traditions before the Global Age62

4 West and Central Asia 79

5 Africa 107

6 Writing Systems and Cultural Memory 128

7 Europe 141

8 The Americas 214

9 Literatures before 200 ce: Concluding Remarks222

VOLUME 2: 200–1500

Contributors to Volume 2 ix

Introduction to Volume 2: Peoples, Languages, and Literatures between 200 and 1500 ce 229

1 East Asia 235

2 Court Literature in East Asia and Europe 345

3 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania 355

4 Animal Stories in South Asia and Europe 426

5 West and Central Asia 433

6 Alexander the Great in Medieval Literature 527

7 Africa 542

8 The Circum-Mediterranean Scene in the First Centuries of the Second Millennium – Mirrored in the Works of Ramon Llull 589

9 Europe 596

10 Christian and Islamic Mysticism 670

11 The Americas 683

VOLUME 3: 1500–1800

Contributors to Volume 3 ix

Introduction to Volume 3: Literature of the World between 1500 and 1800 697

1 East Asia 705

2 South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Oceania 754

3 West and Central Asia 813

4 Africa 862

5 Europe 892

6 The Americas 977

7 Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Literary World 1016

VOLUME 4: 1800–2000

Contributors to Volume 4 ix

Introduction to Volume 4: Literature of the World between 1800 and 2000 1029

1 East Asia 1034

2 South and Southeast Asia 1091

3 Oceania, Australia, and New Zealand 1179

4 West and Central Asia 1221

5 Africa 1322

6 Europe 1413

7 The Americas 1517

Index 1547

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