Professor Jane Hiddleston coedits Multilingual Literature as World Literature

Professor Jane Hiddleston, Official Fellow in French, has coedited a new book on critical approaches to world literature, Multilingual Literature as World Literature, along with Professor Wen-chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London.

The book examines and adjusts current theories and practices of world literature, particularly the conceptions of world, global and local, reflecting on the ways that multilingualism opens up the borders of language, nation and genre, and makes visible different modes of circulation across languages, nations, media and cultures.

The contributors to Multilingual Literature as World Literature examine four major areas of critical research, including how multilingualism reveals pathways of circulation, how politics and ethics contribute to the shaping of multilingual texts and proposing a new vision for linguistic creativity beyond the binary structure of monolingualism versus multilingualism.

Professor Hiddleston’s research interests are focused on postcolonial literatures in French, in particular from North Africa, though also from Sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, as well as postcolonialism and world literature  as critical concepts. Between 2016 and 2020, she was co-investigator on the Oxford-led AHRC programme ‘Creative Multilingualism’, where she worked with researchers in other languages and literatures on the place and significance of multilingualism in world literature, and has published extensively on postcolonialism in French literature.

Find out more and order a copy of Multilingual Literature as World Literature.