Institutions of World Literature

This volume engages with the recent and ongoing consolidation of "world literature" as a paradigm of study, noting that literature is never simply a given, but is always performatively and materially instituted by translators, publishers, academics, critics, readers, and authors. It substantiates, refines, and interrogates current approaches to world literature, focusing on the poetics of writers themselves, market dynamics, postcolonial negotiations, and translation, engaging a range of related disciplines. This book explores how singular literary works become inserted in transnational systems, and how transnational and institutional dimensions of literature are inflected in literary works.