World Literature is an increasingly influential subject in literary studies, which has led to the re-framing of contemporary ideas of ‘national literatures’, language and translation. World Literature: A Reader brings together thirty essential readings which display the theoretical foundations of the subject, as well as showing its conceptual development over a two hundred year period. The book features: an illuminating introduction to the subject, with suggested reading paths to help readers navigate through the materials texts exploring key themes such as globalization, cosmopolitanism, post/trans-nationalism, and translation and nationalism writings by major figures including J. W. Goethe, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Longxi Zhao, David Damrosch, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Pascale Casanova and Milan Kundera. The early explorations of the meaning of ‘Weltliteratur’ are introduced, while twenty-first century interpretations by leading scholars today show the latest critical developments in the field. The editors offer readers the ideal introduction to the theories and debates surrounding the impact of this crucial area on the modern literary landscape.

The most revered work composed in Old English, Beowulf is one of the landmarks of European literature. This handbook supplies a wealth of insights into all major aspects of this wondrous poem and its scholarly tradition. Each chapter provides a history of the scholarly interest in a particular topic, a synthesis of present knowledge and opinion, and an analysis of scholarly work that remains to be done. Written to accommodate the needs of a broad audience, A Beowulf Handbook will be of value to nonspecialists who wish simply to read and enjoy Beowulf and to scholars at work on their own research. In its clear and comprehensive treatment of the poem and its scholarship, this book will prove an indispensable guide to readers and specialists for many years to come.

Alchemy and Amalgam explores a relatively un-researched area of the Baudelairean corpus (his translations from English) and relates them to the rest of his works. It seeks to establish a link between translational and creative writing, arguing for a reassessment of the place of translation in Baudelaire's writing method. Rather than a sideline in Baudelaire's creative activities, translation is thus shown to be a central form of dual writing at the core of his works. Baudelaire's translations from English, his constant rewriting of pre-existing material (including his own), the doublets, the transpositions d'art, and the art criticism are all based on an approach to writing which is essentially derivative but also transformative. Thus the Baudelairean experiment illustrates the limits of romantic notions of originality, creativity and genius, reminding us that all writing is intrinsically intertextual. It also shows the complexity of translation as a form of creation at the core of modern writing. The book is one of the first of its kind to link the study the translational activity of a major writer to his 'creative' writings. It is also one of the first to provide an integrated presentation of French 19th-century translation approaches and to link them to questions of copyright and authorship in the context of the rise of capitalism and romantic views of creation and genius. It offers, therefore, a new perspective both on translation history and on literary history. Alchemy and Amalgam will be of interest to students of translation, comparative literature and French studies.