Description:
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.
Brief description: 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.