The World Republic of Letters

Pascale Casanova

Translated by M. B. DeBevoise

    Preface to the English-Language Edition

    Introduction: The Figure in the Carpet

    Part I: THE LITERARY WORLD

    1. Principles of a World History of Literature

    The Bourse of Literary Values

    Literature, Nation, and Politics

    2. The Invention of Literature

    How to "Devour" Latin

    The Battle over French

    The Cult of Language

    The Empire of French

    The Herderian Revolution

    3. World Literary Space

    Roads to Freedom

    The Greenwich Meridian of Literature

    Literary Nationalism

    National versus International Writers

    Forms of Literary Domination

    4. The Fabric of the Universal

    The Capital and Its Double

    Translation as Littérarisation

    Language Games

    The Importance of Being Universal

    Ethnocentrisms

    Ibsen in England and in France

    5. From Literary Internationalism to Commercial Globalization?

    Part II. LITERARY REVOLTS AND REVOLUTIONS

    6. The Small Literatures

    Literary Destitution

    Political Dependencies

    National Aesthetics

    Kafka and the Connection with Politics

    7. The Assimilated

    Naipaul: The Need to Conform

    Michaux: What Is a Foreigner?

    Cioran: On the Inconvenience of Being Born in Romania

    Ramuz: The Impossible Assimilation

    8. The Rebels

    Literary Uses of the People

    National Tales, Legends, Poetry, and Theater

    Legacy Hunting

    The Importation of Texts

    The Creation of Capitals

    The International of Small Nations

    9. The Tragedy of Translated Men

    Thieves of Fire

    Translated from the Night

    Comings and Goings

    Kafka: Translated from Yiddish

    Creators of Languages

    Literary Uses of the Oral Language

    Andrade: The Anti-Camões

    Swiss Creoleness

    10. The Irish Paradigm

    Yeats: The Invention of Tradition

    The Gaelic League: Recreation of a National Language

    Synge: The Written Oral Language

    O'Casey: The Realist Opposition

    Shaw: Assimilation in London

    Joyce and Beckett: Autonomy

    Genesis and Structure of a Literary Space

    11. The Revolutionaries

    Dante and the Irish

    The Joycean Family

    The Faulknerian Revolution

    Toward the Invention of Literary Languages

    Conclusion: The World and the Literary Trousers

    Notes

    Index

  • Cover: The World Republic of Letters

Pascale Casanova is an associated researcher at the Center for Research in Arts and Language and a literary critic in Paris. She is the author of Beckett the Abstractor (Paris, 1997), winner of the Grand Prix de l’Essai de la Société des Gens de Lettres.