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Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation

Metadata
TitleOral Literary Worlds
SubtitleLocation, Transmission and Circulation
ContributorSara Marzagora(editor)
Francesca Orsini(editor)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0405
Landing pagehttps://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/OBP.0405
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
CopyrightSara Marzagora; Francesca Orsini. Copyright of individual chapters are maintained by the chapter author(s).
PublisherOpen Book Publishers
Publication placeCambridge,UK
Published on2025-01-31
Series
  • World Oral Literature Series vol. 12
  • ISSN Print: 2050-7933
  • ISSN Digital: 2054-362X
ISBN978-1-80511-311-9 (Paperback)
978-1-80511-312-6 (Hardback)
978-1-80511-313-3 (PDF)
978-1-80511-315-7 (HTML)
978-1-80511-314-0 (EPUB)
Short abstractThe 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?
Long abstractThe 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.
Print length364 pages (xviii+346)
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Dimensions156 x 26 x 234 mm | 6.14" x 1.02" x 9.21" (Paperback)
156 x 29 x 234 mm | 6.14" x 1.14" x 9.21" (Hardback)
Weight691g | 24.37oz (Paperback)
870g | 30.69oz (Hardback)
Media13 illustrations
OCLC Number1493372212
THEMA
  • NHTD
  • JBGB
  • AFKP
  • DSM
  • JBCC1
BISAC
  • FIC059100
  • SOC011000
  • PER000000
  • LIT020000
Keywords
  • World Literature
  • Orature
  • Oral Traditions
  • Folklore
  • Vernacular Genres
  • performance
  • popular culture
  • textual circulation
Funding
Contributors

Sara Marzagora

(editor)
Associate Professor at King's College London
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3989-3080

Sara Marzagora is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Previously she held a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at SOAS University of London, where she led the Horn of Africa strand of the MULOSIGE research project. Sara specialises in world literature and global intellectual history, with a particular focus on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Her research on Ethiopian print culture, Amharic literature, and the history of Ethiopian nationalism has appeared, among others, in the Journal of African History, Global Intellectual History, the International History Review, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and the Journal of World Literature. She is currently completing a monograph on early twentieth-century Ethiopian political thought, and co-editing a volume which compares literary and policy perspectives on multilingualism in the Horn of Africa and South Asia.

Francesca Orsini

(editor)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3608-005X

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian interested in bringing a located and multilingual perspective to Indian literary history and world literature. She is the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002), Print and Pleasure (2009), and East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature (2023), and the editor of, among others, Tellings and Texts: Singing, Story-telling and Performance in North India (with Katherine B. Schofield, 2015), and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini). She led the ERC-funded research project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: for a new approach to world literature, from the perspective of North India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa. She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming Cambridge History of Indian Literature. She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.

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