Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures (original) (raw)

1 European language literatures have long ceased staying put in Europe and conversely European literary cultures are increasingly shaped by non-European literatures. While this geopolitical constellation is no recent phenomenon and can be traced back to early modern forms of exchange, exploration, and conquest, the beginning of the 21 st century has witnessed a hitherto unprecedented acceleration of processes of translocation and delocalization. Increasingly, the forces of globalization and migration bear on literature within and beyond Europe, including processes of production, distribution, and reception. The ever-faster travel of literatures and cultures put pressure on the national paradigm as a conventionalized frame for organizing comparative literary history, and the deterritorialization of European languages and literatures considerably complicates the very category 'European.' Due to European colonialism and processes of migration, many European languages have become global languages, shaping literary traditions across the globe and propelling the emergence of new diversified literary traditions, which bind distinct local aesthetic practices into patterns of exchange. In turn, the literary cultures of all European countries are increasingly shaped by so-called minority or ethnic literatures, which often confront European literary models with non-European traditions and radically undo the Herderian placelanguage-people paradigm. Indeed, in our globalized modernity, an age of migration and digitalization, the monolingual paradigm that ties the unity of a nation to the purity of a language has clearly lost its validity. As writers divide their time between different places, claim belongingness to multiple cultures and speak several languages, their writing can no longer be placed plausibly within a