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Copyright

Sara Marzagora; Francesca Orsini;

Published On

2025-01-31

Page Range

pp. 5–46

Language

  • English

Print Length

42 pages

Introduction: Written and Unwritten Literary Geographies

Doing World Literature from the Perspective of Oral Texts

Chapter of: Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation(pp. 5–46)
World literature as the new discipline of global literary and comparative studies has been focusing almost exclusively on written literatures, and specifically on the novel. Orature plays a determinant role in literary expression around the world, yet unwritten verbal arts have been explicitly excluded from definitions of world literature. This introduction discusses key terms like orature, oral literatures and oral traditions, and outlines how a focus on oral texts and performances enriches our understanding of literature, and of world literature.

Contributors

Sara Marzagora

(author)
Associate Professor at King's College London
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3989-3080

Sara Marzagora is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in Comparative Literature at King’s College London. Previously she held a four-year postdoctoral fellowship at SOAS University of London, where she led the Horn of Africa strand of the MULOSIGE research project. Sara specialises in world literature and global intellectual history, with a particular focus on Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Her research on Ethiopian print culture, Amharic literature, and the history of Ethiopian nationalism has appeared, among others, in the Journal of African History, Global Intellectual History, the International History Review, the Journal of African Cultural Studies, and the Journal of World Literature. She is currently completing a monograph on early twentieth-century Ethiopian political thought, and co-editing a volume which compares literary and policy perspectives on multilingualism in the Horn of Africa and South Asia.

Francesca Orsini

(author)
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3608-005X

Francesca Orsini is a literary historian interested in bringing a located and multilingual perspective to Indian literary history and world literature. She is the author of The Hindi Public Sphere (2002), Print and Pleasure (2009), and East of Delhi: Multilingual literary culture and world literature (2023), and the editor of, among others, Tellings and Texts: Singing, Story-telling and Performance in North India (with Katherine B. Schofield, 2015), and The Form of Ideology and the Ideology of Form (2022, with Neelam Srivastava and Laetitia Zecchini). She led the ERC-funded research project Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies: for a new approach to world literature, from the perspective of North India, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa. She co-edits with Debjani Ganguly the series Cambridge Studies in World Literatures and Cultures, and with Whitney Cox the forthcoming Cambridge History of Indian Literature. She is Professor emerita of Hindi and South Asian Literature at SOAS, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.