Literary studies still lack an extensive comparative analysis of different kinds of literature, including ancient and non-Western. How Literary Worlds Are Shaped. A Comparative Poetics of Literary Imagination aims to provide such a study. Literature, it claims, is based on individual and shared human imagination, which creates literary worlds that blend the real and the fantastic, mimesis and genre, often modulated by different kinds of unreliability. The main building blocks of literary worlds are their oral, visual and written modes and three themes: challenge, perception and relation. They are blended and inflected in different ways by combinations of narratives and figures, indirection, thwarted aspirations, meta-usages, hypothetical action as well as hierarchies and blends of genres and text types. Moreover, literary worlds are not only constructed by humans but also shape their lives and reinforce their sense of wonder. Finally, ten reasons are given in order to show how this comparative view can be of use in literary studies. In sum, How Literary Worlds Are Shaped is the first study to present a wide-ranging and detailed comparative account of the makings of literary worlds.

Literary studies still lack an extensive comparative analysis of different kinds of literature, including ancient and non-Western. How Literary Worlds Are Shaped. A Comparative Poetics of Literary Imagination aims to provide such a study. Literature, it claims, is based on individual and shared human imagination, which creates literary worlds that blend the real and the fantastic, mimesis and genre, often modulated by different kinds of unreliability. The main building blocks of literary worlds are their oral, visual and written modes and three themes: challenge, perception and relation. They are blended and inflected in different ways by combinations of narratives and figures, indirection, thwarted aspirations, meta-usages, hypothetical action as well as hierarchies and blends of genres and text types. Moreover, literary worlds are not only constructed by humans but also shape their lives and reinforce their sense of wonder. Finally, ten reasons are given in order to show how this comparative view can be of use in literary studies. In sum, How Literary Worlds Are Shaped is the first study to present a wide-ranging and detailed comparative account of the makings of literary worlds.

On Literary Worlds develops new strategies and perspectives for understanding aesthetic worlds.

A glorious collection that delves deep into the inception, influences, and literary and historical underpinnings of nearly 100 of our most beloved fictional realms. Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans four thousand years of creative endeavor. From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. Each piece includes a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae." Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction. Laura Miller is the book's general editor. Co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor and writer for 20 years, she is currently a books and culture columnist at Slate. A journalist and a critic, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the "Last Word" column for two years. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and editor of the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.

This Companion presents lucid and exemplary critical essays, introducing readers to the major ideas and practices of world literary studies.

Works of genre fiction are a source of enjoyment, read during cherished leisure time and in incidental moments of relaxation. This original book takes readers inside three popular genres of fiction, including crime, fantasy, and romance, to reveal how personal tastes, social connections, and industry knowledge shape genre worlds. Attuned to both the pleasure and the profession of producing genre fiction, the authors investigate contemporary developments in the field?the rise of Amazon, self-publishing platforms, transmedia storytelling, and growing global publishing conglomerates?and show how these interact with older practices, from fan conventions to writers? groups. Sitting at the intersection of literary studies, genre studies, fan studies, and studies of the book and publishing cultures, Genre Worlds considers how contemporary genre fiction is produced and circulated on a global scale. Its authors propose an innovative theoretical framework that unfolds genre fiction?s most compelling characteristics: its connected social, industrial, and textual practices. As they demonstrate, genre fiction books are not merely texts; they are also nodes of social and industrial activity involving the production, dissemination, and reception of the texts.

Literary Worlds and Deleuze contributes to debates on mimesis by offering an ‘expressionist’ take on the matter of the generation of literary worlds in drama. In examining postdramatic plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp, Caryl Churchill, and Laura Wade, the book outlines a dynamic ontology of mimesis. Rather than pertaining to a static ontology of ‘being’, expressionist mimesis is generative and renews itself constantly without arriving at an entelechial end. In exploring the fluxional field of forces and relations that underlie the order of representation, expressionist mimesis is well suited to account for the ontologically uncertain realities of postdramatic theatre. The concepts of ‘expression’ and ‘the event of sense’ (Gilles Deleuze) become part of a generative model that incorporates pre-linguistic and supra-conceptual constituents within the genesis of representation.

How Literary Worlds Are Shaped studies a wide variety of literature across cultures and ages. The main aim is to show that literature all over the world has for millennia employed an array of related themes and techniques. By its broad scope and det

World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

"The story of literature in sixteen acts, from Alexander the Great and the Iliad to ebooks and Harry Potter, this engaging book brings together remarkable people and surprising events to show how writing shaped cultures, religions, and the history of the world"--