The New Guide To Modern World Literature

A comprehensive account of twentiethcentury world literature. Important writers are put into historical, critical, biographical, and sociological context.

The Guide to Modern World Literature is a reference book by Martin Seymour-Smith that aims to describe every important 20th-century author (as of 1985), in all languages, in an encyclopedic presentation. The book covers an estimated 2,700 authors and more than 7,500 titles. It contains a total of 33 chapters that treat all modern national literatures individually or in groups. African and Caribbean literature is treated collectively; so are the Baltic, French and Belgian, Indian and Pakistani, Jewish, Latin American, Scandinavian, and both Eastern and Western Minor Literatures. A chapter each is given to American, Arabic, Australian, British, Bulgarian, Canadian, Chinese, Czechoslovakian, Dutch, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, New Zealand, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, South African, Spanish, Turkish, and Yugoslavian Literature.

opinion, the Guide offers a discriminating - and sometimes controversial - view of a broad range of contemporary literatures.

This Companion presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to the major ideas and practices of world literary studies.

We have grown accustomed to understanding world literature as a collection of national or linguistic traditions bound together in the universality of storytelling. Michael Allan challenges this way of thinking and argues instead that the disciplinary framework of world literature, far from serving as the neutral meeting ground of national literary traditions, levels differences between scripture, poetry, and prose, and fashions textual forms into a particular pedagogical, aesthetic, and ethical practice. In the Shadow of World Literature examines the shift from Qur'anic schooling to secular education in colonial Egypt and shows how an emergent literary discipline transforms the act of reading itself. The various chapters draw from debates in literary theory and anthropology to consider sites of reception that complicate the secular/religious divide—from the discovery of the Rosetta stone and translations of the Qur'an to debates about Charles Darwin in the modern Arabic novel. Through subtle analysis of competing interpretative frames, Allan reveals the ethical capacities and sensibilities literary reading requires, the conceptions of textuality and critique it institutionalizes, and the forms of subjectivity it authorizes. A brilliant and original exploration of what it means to be literate in the modern world, this book is a unique meditation on the reading practices that define the contours of world literature.

A Critical, comprehensive and entertaining account of modern world literature for students, teachers, librarians and writers.