Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures
Short description
The aim of the project is to explore how aesthetic values, genres, forms, literary communities and individual authorships are shaped in trade-offs between the local and the global, the national and the transnational, and between hegemonic and dominated languages in Asian, African, European and American contexts.
Focusing on such productive tensions between cosmopolitan and vernacular trajectories in the modern period, the 26 sub-projects also investigate how literature can advance the critical understanding of cosmopolitanism – both historically and in our contemporary moment shaped by globalisation, resurgent nationalisms, regionalisms and racisms.
Research questions cluster around translation and circulation, literary history, migration, multilingualism, and the “world-making” capacity of literature. Methodologically, it engages with world literature studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies, book history, translation studies and anthropology.
Besides Stockholm University, there are also participants affiliated with the universities of Uppsala, Lund and Göteborg, as well as Södertörn University and Dalarna University.