Introduction

The introduction outlines the central theoretical and methodological concerns of the book, including its place in current world literature debates, the relationship between nation, nationalism, and literary form, and the cultural significance of the semi-periphery. It also proposes a definition of semi-peripheral realism, which will be expanded in each of the chapters that follow. The first section explores the idea of world literature, from its origins in the nineteenth century, to its recent iterations in comparative and postcolonial literary studies. The second section explores the function of the semi-periphery in the capitalist world-economy and suggests that comparing literary texts produced in this crucial space constitutes a valuable contribution to the materialist world-literature paradigm. The chapter then moves on to addressing the question of peripheral aesthetics, with close reference to Fredric Jameson’s controversial essay “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital,” which I consider vital for understanding the dialectical engagement with the nation and cultural nationalism in peripheral and semi-peripheral literatures. The final part of the introduction responds to Joe Cleary’s call for new ‘theories and historical atlases of twentieth-century realism’ (2012: 255) and positions the texts selected for study, Halldór Laxness’s Iceland’s Bell and The Atom Station, William Heinesen’s The Good Hope and The Black Cauldron, Latife Tekin’s Dear Shameless Death and Swords of Ice, and Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul and Snow, as examples of semi-peripheral realism.