Book cover placeholder

Copyright

Sara Marzagora; Francesca Orsini. Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-311-9
Hardback978-1-80511-312-6
PDF978-1-80511-313-3
HTML978-1-80511-315-7
EPUB978-1-80511-314-0

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • NHTD
  • JBGB
  • AFKP
  • DSM
  • JBCC1

BISAC

  • FIC059100
  • SOC011000
  • PER000000
  • LIT020000

    Oral Literary Worlds

    Location, Transmission and Circulation

    FORTHCOMING
    The discipline of world literature has traditionally focused on written literatures, particularly the novel, with little emphasis placed on the unwritten verbal arts, despite the significance of oral literary expressions around the world, in the past as in the present. This volume redresses this gap by putting the discipline of world literature into dialogue with scholarship on orature and folklore. It asks, what does world literature look like if we start from orature, from oral texts and utterances, and from the performances and audiences that support it?

    Featuring contributions from an international array of scholars, Oral Literary Worlds explores oral traditions from three multilingual regions: the Maghreb, East Africa and South Asia. Essays discuss a variety of vernacular genres, from Swahili tumbuizo to Na’o folk songs, shedding light on less studied forms of vernacular oral production. Collectively, the contributions critique the characterisation of oral traditions as static and pre-modern, and underscore the contemporary relevance of orature to cultural and political discourse.

    Oral Literary Worlds offers a timely and accessible perspective on world literature through the lens of orature, moving away from traditional hierarchies and dichotomies that have characterised previous scholarship. It aims to open up new ways of thinking through local and transnational textual circulation, literary power dynamics, the interaction between textuality and audiences, and aesthetic philosophies.

    This volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars of world literature, folklore and performance studies, and will further interest teachers and students of popular culture, literature of dissent and music.

    Contributors

    Sara Marzagora

    (editor)
    Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at King's College London
    https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3989-3080

    Sara Marzagora is an Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Previously she held a four-year postdoctoral at SOAS University of London, where she contributed to the Horn of Africa strand of the MULOSIGE research project. She researches Ethiopian literature and political thought from the standpoint of global intellectual history, world literature, critical theory, and postcolonial theory. She is currently finalizing her book manuscript, provisionally titled “The True Meaning of Independence: Ethiopian Intellectuals in a Colonial World (1901-1936)”. Her work has been published on the Journal of African History, Journal of African Cultural Studies, African Identities and the Journal of World Literature.

    Francesca Orsini

    (editor)
    Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London
    https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3608-005X

    Francesca Orsini is Professor of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS University of London and a Fellow of the British Academy. She is currently finishing a book on the multilingual literary history of Awadh from the 15c to the early 20c. She is also leading a project funded by the European Research Council (2015-2020) on “Multilingual locals and significant geographies: for a new approach to world literature” (MULOSIGE), which proposes an alternative, located and multilingual approach to world literature from the perspective of three regions: North India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.