The Silk Roads of World Literature

Ouyang, Wen-Chin

Abstract

Ideas, motifs, aesthetics, bodies of knowledge, texts, genres and literary worlds have travelled for centuries along Silk Road’s multiple networks of circulation connected through myriad contact hubs located across many temporal and spatial planes. This chapter argues that the Silk Road offers a roadmap for thinking about modes of circulation in world literature in ways that take us beyond the linear trajectory of West influencing the East, the centrifugal proliferation of the European novel around the world, the centripetal East coming to the West for a place, and the single temporality of the global visions of “modern” “colonial” and “postcolonial” “planetarity,” “globalization.” It offers two examples. The 1001 Nights is a classic example of the global circulation of a “text” beyond “translation-as-circulation” and the confines of monologically defined language, nation, genre and historical period. Coffee is a site of global connectedness and intercultural exchange in a comparative analysis of coffee in five literary works from Egypt, Japan, Palestine, Taiwan and Turkey. The global pasts of coffee give shape to the literary world and worldliness; however, each is uniquely mapped by the itinerary of coffee and the cultures it has picked up on the way.

Citation

Ouyang, W.-C. (2021). The Silk Roads of World Literature. In D. Ganguly (Ed.), The Cambridge History of World Literature (63-79). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064446.003

• Publication Date: Sep 9, 2021
• Deposit Date: May 21, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 31, 2021
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Pages: 63-79
• Series Title: Cambridge Studies in World Literature
• Book Title: The Cambridge History of World Literature
• ISBN: 9781108493581
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009064446.003