Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation

The discipline of world literature has traditionally focused on written literatures, particularly the novel, with little emphasis placed on the unwritten verbal arts, despite the significance of oral literary expressions around the world, in the past as in the present. This volume redresses this gap by putting the discipline of world literature into dialogue with scholarship on orature and folklore. It asks, what does world literature look like if we start from orature, from oral texts and utterances, and from the performances and audiences that support it?

The discipline of world literature has traditionally focused on written literatures, particularly the novel, with little emphasis placed on the unwritten verbal arts, despite the significance of oral literary expressions around the world, in the past as in the present. This volume redresses this gap by putting the discipline of world literature into dialogue with scholarship on orature and folklore. It asks, what does world literature look like if we start from orature, from oral texts and utterances, and from the performances and audiences that support it?

Featuring contributions from an international array of scholars, Oral Literary Worlds explores oral traditions from three multilingual regions: the Maghreb, East Africa and South Asia. Essays discuss a variety of vernacular genres, from Swahili tumbuizo to Na’o folk songs, shedding light on less studied forms of vernacular oral production. Collectively, the contributions critique the characterisation of oral traditions as static and pre-modern, and underscore the contemporary relevance of orature to cultural and political discourse.

Oral Literary Worlds offers a timely and accessible perspective on world literature through the lens of orature, moving away from traditional hierarchies and dichotomies that have characterised previous scholarship. It aims to open up new ways of thinking through local and transnational textual circulation, literary power dynamics, the interaction between textuality and audiences, and aesthetic philosophies.

This volume will be an invaluable resource for scholars of world literature, folklore and performance studies, and will further interest teachers and students of popular culture, literature of dissent and music.