Winner, 2018 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures, Modern Language Association

Winner, 2018 German Studies Association DAAD Book Prize in Germanistik and Cultural Studies.
From the current vantage point of the transformation of books and libraries, B. Venkat Mani presents a historical account of world literature. By locating translation, publication, and circulation along routes of "bibliomigrancy"-the physical and virtual movement of books-Mani narrates how world literature is coded and recoded as literary works find new homes on faraway bookshelves.
Mani argues that the proliferation of world literature in a society is the function of a nation's relationship with print culture-a Faustian pact with books. Moving from early Orientalist collections, to the Nazi magazine Weltliteratur, to the European Digital Library, Mani reveals the political foundations for a history of world literature that is at once a philosophical ideal, a process of exchange, a mode of reading, and a system of classification.
Shifting current scholarship's focus from the academic to the general reader, from the university to the public sphere, Recoding World Literature argues that world literature is culturally determined, historically conditioned, and politically charged.

About the Author
B. Venkat Mani is Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he is also affiliated with the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture and the Institute for Regional and International Studies.

Reviews
"This is a splendid, erudite, sophisticated, and eminently readable book that makes vital, original interventions in several interlocking fields in the humanities." -- -Leslie Adelson Cornell University "Recoding World Literature is a work of stunning scope. Drawing on archives across languages and countries, from Goethe to Pamuk, and taking seriously the well-known fact that world literature was in origin a German idea, Mani provides a fresh and alternative history of this now hegemonic concept. The discussion about world literature is about to undergo a definite reorientation." -- -Aamir Mufti University of California, Los Angeles "Venkat Mani's engrossing study of 'bibliomigrancy' makes an important contribution to studies of world literature and the politics of culture, probing the values-and the exclusions-encoded in libraries, translation series, and now the digital archive. Every bibliophile will want to add this sparkling and thought- provoking book to their personal library." -- -David Damrosch Harvard University


Awards
Winner of DAAD/GSA Book Prize 2018 and Aldo & Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages & Literatures 2018.



Book Information
ISBN 9780823273416
Author B. Venkat Mani
Format Paperback
Page Count 360
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press