combinng logic world history world literature christian

Just putting all of this together in one book is a tour de force, but it inevitably offers a kaleidoscopic, rather than neatly coherent, view of the issues at hand.ģTo engage with world literature is indeed to court paradox (I say this as a world literature scholar myself). Divided into three sections called “People,” “Networks and Method,” and “Transformations,” the companion contains no less than 27 chapters, including two introductory surveys by the central scholars (in each respective field) David Damrosch and Patrick Manning. At the same time, the volume also illustrates many of the conundrums that such an ambition must confront. Although companions and edited volumes of world literature are rife today, no other book on the market brings world history scholars so decisively into the conversation. It is also hard to disagree with the hope she expresses in the introduction for a “convergence” ( xvii) of world literature and world history. Rudyard Kipling, Anthony Trollope, Langston Hughes, Rabindranath Tagore and others are in this way brought together under the aegis of an undeniably significant and conflictual historical site.ĢHawas’s chapter clearly aims at disrupting entrenched (national and/or linguistic) habits of thinking about literature and history, and can be read as exemplary of her own ambitions with the volume. Her focus lies on the short century from the canal’s opening in 1869 to the Suez crisis in 1956, which was as symbolic a marker of the new postcolonial era as the Bandung conference of 1955.

By first establishing a dense historical context in this way, Hawas can then bring Arabic, British, American, French and Indian literary texts to bear on her discussion. Her key example is the Suez Canal, a pre-eminent geopolitical pressure point across two centuries – but also with an ancient history as an idea and a dream before it was finally built. The second is that world-historical crises can be posited as nodal points through which we can study literary production and reception. The first is that world history offers an understanding of the “maturation of global networks over time” (219).

In her own contribution to this impressively wide-ranging companion, the editor May Hawas makes two claims in support of such a view. 1World literature and world history can seem like a match made in heaven.

Combinng logic world history world literature christian