This chapter covers Haitian periodical culture in early nineteenth-century Haiti (1804–1843) and the spirited, fraught process of national literary formation under Henry Christophe, Alexandre Pétion, and Jean-Pierre Boyer. It considers early periodicals and their engagement in political combat and partisan confrontation, within Haiti and in the broader Atlantic world. Early Haitian writers refuted European racial pseudoscience that sustained slavery and engaged in internal polemics on the nature of Haiti’s independence; the best form of governance for the nation’s survival; and the meaning of freedom, civilization, and literature. The chapter argues that these aspects of early periodical culture were central to the development of Haitian literature. It traces the development of an idea of Haitian national literature in that culture. Whereas earlier newspapers presented ‘literature’ as the inclusion of occasional verse and creative poetic production in their pages, newspapers, magazines and eventually specialized journals began to theorize the existence of a national Haitian literature national literary culture—an idea that would become fully realized by the late 1830s.

This chapter examines novels by both male and female writers who published some of their mostprominent works in and around 1884, to address issues and themes that illustrate generalarguments about the 1880s and beyond. Authors and their works are presented as aheterogeneous group of men and women whose views pose multiple perspectives on theconnection between Argentine literature and politics. Miguel Cané, Eugenio Cambaceres, JuanaManuela Gorriti, Raimunda Torres y Quiroga, Antonio Argerich, and Lola Larrosa comment oneducation, reading, writing, literature, and family relations, reflecting the frenetic changes inWestern industrialized societies at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the globalanxieties that these transformations brought to individuals across classes and territories. Theformation of Argentine literature can only be thought of as an unfinished process, with multiplesources, and in connection with other nations and regions. Setting the year 1884 as themoment in which to find the literary bases of the Argentine canon is an exercise that allows usto trace, instead of a clear origin for Argentine national literature, the germ of multiple possibleaccounts of its foundation.

Borges is an Argentine writer whose work has deserved extensive and brilliant critical analyses. Reviewing the canonical interpretations (Ricardo Piglia, Sylvia Molloy, Daniel Balderston, Beatriz Sarlo, among others), this chapter seeks to rethink Borges’ work in the twenty-first century usiing two main approaches. The first will review the idea of “work” in Borges. As Annick Louis has studied, the unstable nature of his work demands a reconceptualization of the processes of construction of literature that expands the limits of the book, the author, and the text, and that circulates in different media (books, magazines, lectures, interviews, chats). A second way is to expand the dialogues and conversations that his textuality offers. Focused on the obvious literary bonds, most of his critics have read his work emphasizing the different forms of intertextuality. But Borges’ universe includes much more aesthetics and cultural practices, as Alan Pauls has shown. If Borges strongly questioned the ideas of the author and work, he also questioned the ideas of literature, art, culture, and media. The chapter also analyzes the place of Borges in the context of national culture and its relationship with world literature.

The epilogue reflects on some of the implications of the localized nature of the study and the historicism it practices. It questions the period boundary between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century British literature as well as the too easy application of the term metaphysical to a disparate set of writers. In the process, it argues for an awareness of the distances that texts traveled as they influenced other writers and an openness to adopting a wider, more transnational, sense of literary connections and networks.

From his Rimbaldian early poetry to his tri-continental and globe-spanning novels, The Savage Detectives and 2666, Bolaño maintains a critically “exilic” distance from both literary and political forms of nationalism. Writing, in his own words, from a ‘wild’ space ‘equally distant from all the countries in the world’, Bolaño inscribes poetry in particular under the weight of a double destitution: as a synecdoche for poverty, exile, errancy and disappearance, on the one hand, and for a will to become ungovernable on the other. Yet, in mapping out the cumulative wanderings of these errant poet-underdogs, Bolaño’s oeuvre does not stop at exposing the ‘nation’ to its anomic ‘unhomeliness’ in times of globalization. Indeed, in radicalizing both Baudelaire’s spirit of indifference to social forms and Melville’s dismantling of the narrative form, Bolaño exposes both world and work to radical contingency, making the errant poetic-underdog the figure of radical ungovernability. Tracing these constellations through brief discussions of ‘The Romantic Dogs’, The Savage Detectives, Amulet, a selection of short stories from Putas asesinas, 2666, and Antwerp, the chapter draws its theoretical inspiration from Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘What is a Destituent Power’.

This chapter addresses proto-nationalist, Indianist discourses based on early colonial depictions of Brazil’s lands and people in the epic poems Uraguai (1769) by José Basilio da Gama, and Caramuru (1781) by José de Santa Rita Durão. Both poems offer examples of Indianist tradition that would go on to become models for the aesthetic nationalism of the nineteenth century. Given that the eighteenth century represents a coming of age in Brazilian literature, the absence of Africans in these two poems is noteworthy. This essay explores the simultaneous prominence of Natives and invisibility of Africans in colonial Brazilian literary texts and proposes that the mythological idealization of the Indian was used as a pretext to conceal the problem of the “Negro.” As with any ideology, the literary texts that committed to the building of Brazilian nationhood enforced ways of thinking about Afro-Brazilian people that endure through time.

The main aim of this chapter is to articulate the relationship between literary catalogs and their creation of readerships, especially when the said relationship is mediated by the state. I propose that the catalogs of national, and by extension world literature become politically and ideology inflected, sometimes through facilitation, other times through obstruction by the state and its ancillaries. I further argue in this chapter that through differentiations of the native and the foreign, the indigenous and the migrant—often propagated through majoritarian myths of national origins—the state functions to privilege certain languages and literatures over others by claims of ownership of certain literary traditions and rejection of others. In addition, the chapter also provide examples of ways in which populist conflations of the indigenous with the original are offered resistance. To this end, the chapter I want to draw attention to three “bibliographic” moments in the changing pact with books of the Indian reading publics: late nineteenth, mid-twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries.

The inadequacies inherent in tracing literary history in purely national terms have been apparent ever since the emergence of national literature in the early nineteenth century: the problems caused by multilingual nations, authors, and texts; by multinational languages, and so on. If world literature is not merely to replicate the errors of national-literary analysis on a larger scale, then new geographies will be needed. Various options exist, from the “areas” of Area Studies (linked to a dubious model of “civilizational” contact and conflict), to “-spheres” and “-phones” (the Sinophone, the Anglosphere, etc.), to hemispheric and oceanic studies. Each of these approaches opens new perspectives – and creates new blind spots. I review an alternative model, which I have earlier proposed in my An Ecology of World Literature (Verso Books, 2015), which seeks instead to identify typological similarities between the “ecological” contexts in which literatures exist. These similarities are transhistoric and trans-continental, and while they do not provide a perfect substitute for geographically-based models in all circumstances, my ecological typology suggests new comparative possibilities for world literature.

This chapter introduces the critical issues that permeate the discussion of the location and horizon of Coetzee’s literary practice. It starts by noting a polarization among critics between those who characterize his literary project as being a highly localized one that speaks to the condition of South Africa and those who regard his work as being concerned with universal problems and as belonging to ‘world literature’. It delves into this problem by considering the way Coetzee himself narrates the vicissitudes of a writer navigating national and global literary fields in Elizabeth Costello. Looking next at his corpus as a whole, the chapter argues that an appreciation of Coetzee’s peculiar world-making fictional strategies helps us to discern that world (or worlds) to which his fictions seek to orient us. It concludes by considering Coetzee’s recent interest in the ‘literatures of the south’, speculating that his corpus has been concerned to explore through its world-making what it means to live beneath southern horizons.

The vibrant periodical culture of the nineteenth century was significantly formed by writers and publishers from Ireland and Scotland. These journalists were often athwart what we now regard as canonical Romantic and Victorian writing, and in their work crafted a satiric, parodic counterpoint to new valorisations of poetic insight, imaginative originality and aesthetic disinterestedness. The work of William Maginn and Francis Sylvester Mahony demonstrates the transnational, polyglossic and multifaceted authorial games that periodical culture enabled. Whether remembered as proto-postmodern critics of poetic afflatus, or embittered hacks squandering their potential for a pay cheque, periodical writers created a literature teetering between brilliant comedy and tedious sniping. Undermining ideas of authenticity and authorial originality, periodical literature brought to the fore tensions inherent in nineteenth-century celebrations of national culture and aesthetic idealism.