This open access book uses Swedish literature and the Swedish publishing field as recurring examples to describe and analyse the role of the literary semi-peripheral position in world literature from various perspectives and on meso, micro and macro levels, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. This includes the role of translation in the semi-periphery and the conditions under which literature travels to and from that position. The focus is not on Sweden, as such, but rather on the semi-peripheral transitional space as exemplified by the Swedish case.
Consisting of three co-written chapters, this study sheds light on what might be called the semi-peripheral condition or the semi-periphery as an area of transition. As part of the Cosmopolitan and Vernacular Dynamics in World Literatures series, it makes continuous use of the concepts of 'cosmopolitan' and 'vernacular' – or rather, the processual terms, cosmopolitanization and vernacularization – which provide an overall structure to the analysis of literature and literary phenomena. In this way, the authors show that the semi-periphery is an ideal point of departure to further the understanding of world literature, because it is a place where the cosmopolitan (the literary universal) and the vernacular (the rootedness in a particular culture or place) interact in ways that have not yet been thoroughly explored.
The transformation of the publishing world in recent decades—which includes, among other things, the increasing significance of large retail outlets, the emergence and establishment of literary agents, and the merger of publishing houses into large media corporations—has been amply documented. Among the consequences for postcolonial literary fiction, and African English-language fiction, which is the subject here, are increasing use of the author as a public figure and marketing device, and heightened expectations on cultural representativity that link authors to particular places and cultures. With a focus on the initial and middle phases of his career, this article discusses the ways in which East African author Abdulrazak Gurnah has responded to such pressures in his novels and in essays and articles. It shows how both the form and the content of Gurnah’s writing exemplify a double effort to complicate ideas which frame authors and their texts through culture-specific identities and the seemingly opposite, generalizing notion of the postcolonial’ author which flattens history—a strategy of ‘self-authorization’ which can be seen as Gurnah’s critical resistance towards received categories used in both book marketing and postcolonial authorship. In a further twist, this resistance is in some tension with Gurnah’s choice to write in English and use an unmarked linguistic style and register since these seemingly align with marketing interests and enable easy translation which facilitates the global circulation of his books.
This article starts from two premises: that the almost exclusive reliance on the novel in several of the dominant elaborations of world literary models gives a very partial view of the global circulation of literature and, consequently, that much can be gained through analyses of complementary or alternative media and, secondly, that certain arguments within postcolonial literary studies on the circulation and audiences of African literature are inadequately grounded empirically. Taking the literary magazine Transition as an example – and more precisely its first, Ugandan, period –, this article seeks to make a contribution to both fields. Through discussion of the publication’s content and its circulation pattern, it shows that most of the authors published came from African countries, but also included British, American and Caribbean contributors; that poetry was its most represented literary genre, even as the magazine published seminal prose material; that the magazine’s readers, many of whom interacted actively, were found across the African continent and in Europe and the U.S.A.; and that Transition combined characteristics of "little" and "big" magazines. These empirical findings, the article argues, raise questions about key issues in world literary as well as postcolonial literary conceptualization – such as the status of the nation or the national field in world literary studies, the limitations of the notion of "literature" they use, and the relationship between (post-)colonial and "imperial" channels for production and circulation of literary artefacts.