Placing itself within the burgeoning field of world literary studies, the organising principle of this book is that of an open-ended dynamic, namely the cosmopolitan-vernacular exchange.
As an adaptable comparative fulcrum for literary studies, the notion of the cosmopolian-vernacular exchange accommodates also highly localised literatures. In this way, it redresses what has repeatedly been identified as a weakness of the world literature paradigm, namely the onesided focus on literature that accumulates global prestige or makes it on the Euro-American book market.
How has the vernacular been defined historically? How is it inflected by gender? How are the poles of the vernacular and the cosmopolitan distributed spatially or stylistically in literary narratives? How are cosmopolitan domains of literature incorporated in local literary communities? What are the effects of translation on the encoding of vernacular and cosmopolitan values?
Ranging across a dozen languages and literature from five continents, these are some of the questions that the contributions attempt to address.
Alling, Annika Mörte: - Annika Mörte Alling is Associate Professor of French literature at Lund University. Most of her publications have dealt with the nineteenth-century French novel, from various angles: the translation and reception of French literature in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the "Bovarysm" of Jules de Gaultier in novels by Stendhal and Flaubert, the problem of endings and closures in Balzac, mimetic desire in Stendhal (doctoral thesis, 2003). Currently, she has two main areas of research: firstly, the dynamics between the vernacular and the cosmopolitan in the nineteenth-century French novel; secondly, the role of emotion in literature teaching. ORCID: https: //orcid.org/0000-0001-8163-8468
Helgesson, Stefan: - Stefan Helgesson is Professor of English at Stockholm University and the principal investigator of the cosmpolitan-vernacular research programme. His research interests include southern African literature in English and Portuguese, Brazilian literature, postcolonial theory, translation theory and theories of world literature. He is the author of Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer, Ndebele and Coetzee (2004) and Transnationalism in Southern African Literature (2009), and is co-editor (with Pieter Vermeulen) of Institutions of World Literature: Writing, Translation, Markets (2015). He has published widely in journals such as PMLA, History and Theory, Research in African Literatures, Interventions and Translation Studies. ORCID: https: //orcid.org/0000-0002-2222-1037
Lindqvist, Yvonne: - Yvonne Lindqvist is Associate Professor, Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies, and Deputy Director of the Institute for Interpreting and Translation Studies at the Department of Swedish Language and Multilingualism, Stockholm University. Her current research within the Sociology of Translation and World Literature studies multidirectional cosmopolitanising and vernacularising translation dynamics and translation as a social practice. ORCID: https: //orcid.org/0000-0002-5413-3891
