It is a truth universally acknowledged that culture shapes the way we tell, share, and understand stories. The structures of stories and the conditions under which they are transmitted and read are all quite different depending on the geographical location, time period, and culture in which they originated. For literary studies, the handling of a vast variety of literature from all around the world is the cornucopia for its teaching and research.
It is a wealth that has been merely a minor interest for literary studies for decades. In particular, the sensitivity for a variety of cross-cultural readings has only been treated as a margin in literary studies. For instance, it is nearly impossible to write only about the history of the nineteenth century novels in Europe from Finland to Turkey, because the bibliographies of books shared throughout Europe do not exist. At the same time, we only have limited...
