Mapping World Literature

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen is Associate Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has been a Visiting Scholar and guest lecturer at Stanford University and is editor of the academic journal Passage.

• Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. World Literature: History, concept, paradigm; 2. Shifting focal points in the international canon; 3. Migrant writers and cosmopolitan culture; 4. Ethics and aesthetics in traumatic literature; Conclusion: Constellations as facts and experiments; Notes; References; Appendix: World Literature by Georg Brandes; Index.

"Rosendahl Thomsen's book offers us, for the first time, a both comprehensive and systematic overview of the history, and of the different phenomena and the semantic layers of ‘World Literature' today. This would already make his work truly important. But Thomsen goes one decisive step further: he not only points to the traumatic conditions that, in addition to the process of 'globalization', have permeated and founded the experience of 'World Literature'; he also proposes a new concept of literary 'constellations' that has the capacity to trigger and to orient future empirical research. Altogether, this is an amazing début by a young Danish scholar within the English-speaking scene of Literary Criticism and Literary Theory."Professor Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Albert Guérard Professor in Literature, Stanford University, USA