On 15th March 2019, Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould delivered a lecture about her ERC-funded project Global Literary Theory at the India International Centre, New Delhi. We are now pleased to present an audio recording of that lecture.
Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould is Professor, Islamic World and Comparative Literature, College of Arts and Law, University of Birmingham, and Director, of Global Literary Theory. Her next book is Persian Prison Poem: Sovereignty and the Political Imagination (Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
In her lecture, Gould discusses how cross-cultural encounters have generated new literary theories and new understandings of literature within the Islamic world. She traces the development of literary theory and poetics across the Islamic world, from the Arabic domains to Central and South Asia, including in works by Ibn al-Mu’tazz, ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani, Shams-i Qays Razi, Raduyani, and Amir Khusrow. The stimulus multilingualism has given to Islamic literary theory reveals an understanding of the relationship between the literary text and the world that stands to enrich contemporary literary thought, and which will help students and scholars of literature expand their geographic frameworks.