Subject Area: English

Literature creates worlds, but literature is also in the world and about the world. Some of the most compelling contemporary literature in English is produced to express local contexts and specific literary traditions, but these texts also participate, in uneven and unpredictable ways, in global networks and systems. Taking a range of contemporary literary texts (novel, poetry, drama) as its starting point, you will explore the linked questions of world literatures and literary worlds. Through this course you will consider the importance of the local or the regional, the circulation of texts through translation or adaptation as well as through the movements (voluntary and involuntary) of people, and the effect of global literary markets on writers, readers and texts.

In this course you will be asked to pay close attention to literary language as well as engage with key themes such as the construction of home and self, the experience of diaspora and cross-cultural engagement, writing and artistic practice and the ways in which transformation is often figured in this context. You will also consider and discuss the importance of ethics, politics and political struggle in global literatures.