Scale Shifting: New Insights into Global Literary Circulation

This special issue on scale shifting brings into sharper focus the complexity of global literary circulation, especially when viewed from the perspective of global literary peripheries. In this introduction, we present the idea of scale shifting, a concept we use to move beyond translation to include circulation in global languages, such as English and French. We build on earlier analyses that mapped previous literary worlds and shed light on the aesthetic and sociological factors that enabled outsiders to enter them by (1) focusing on how peripheralised writers scale up to gain global recognition in multiscalar literary fields and (2) analysing how, in turn, this scale shifting changes the national, regional and global levels of these fields. In addition, we provide a preview of each article included in this volume and summarise the collective takeaways gleaned from our individual case studies.