World Literature Decentered

What would world literature look like, if we stopped referring to the West? Starting with the provocative premise that the West is ten percent of the planet, World Literature Decentered is the first book to decenter Eurocentric discourses of global literature and global history not just by deconstructing or historicizing them, but by actively providing an alternative. Looking at a series of themes across three literatures (Mexico, Turkey and Bengal), the book examines hotels, melancholy, orientalism, femicide and the ghost story in a series of literary traditions outside the West. The non-West, the book argues, is no fringe group or token minority in need of attention on the contrary, it constitutes the overwhelming majority of this world.