What makes a world author? How did Homer become a «cosmopolitan» author? How does a Mayan
creation narrative challenge our Western logocentric ideas of foundational texts? What might
world literature look like to a fourth-century Roman reader? How do past and more recent
translations of Dante's Commedia help us to rethink the changing definitions of world
literature? How did the Alexander romance adapt to an Islamic context? How did Tasso's epic
adapt to a later cultural context dominated by the «Turkish Fear»? What shaped the West's first
impression of The Tale of Genji? How does the Ovidian myth of Arachne migrate from Japan to the
Caribbean? What are the foundational metaphors at the root of Goethe's weltliteratur paradigm?
What happens when cultures import canonical texts for lack of their own? By what process does
an eccentric writer reconstruct a new foundational text from heterogeneous fragments of other
cultures? How did literary criticism contribute to the canonization of the Thousand and One
Nights in Western literature? What is left of the primacy of the national language when writers
are published simultaneously in various translations? How do modern misreadings shape our
understanding of national epics and ensure their survival? World literature first intuited in
Goethe's foundational idea of weltliteratur as literature that seeks to transcend national
boundaries is viewed here in its essential mobility and migratory capacity which relies on
the centrality of the reading act. This volume focuses on foundational texts as they are read
across cultures languages and historical contexts. Its goal is to reflect on canonical texts -
from Homer's Odyssey to Murakami's Genji from Cervantes to Mayan hieroglyphs from Dante to
Coetzee from Goethe to Lezama Lima from the Thousand and One Nights to Jorge Luis Borges - in
a global perspective: how they are translated appropriated transformed how they travel
across different cultures and languages their foundational status evolving accordingly in a
post-European world. Foundational Texts of World Literature includes contributions by Gerardo
Aldana Sandra Bermann Piero Boitani Michael Emmerich Azadeh Yamini Hamedani Stefan
Helgesson Paulo Lemos Horta Juan Pablo Lupi Peter Madsen Ulrich Marzolph Suzanne Saïd
Evanghelia Stead Mads Rosendahl Thomsen and Richard Van Leeuwen.
