How Literatures Begin: A Global History edited by Joel B. Lande and Denis Feeney

This remarkable book offers seventeen detailed answers to what the editors call a “robust question” (3). The question itself is triple—what is a literature; what is a beginning; and how are they related? The book asks us to “take stock of the tremendous variations within different societies” (4). We do, with a slightly dizzying effect. What does ancient China have in common with modern Russia, or ancient Greece with postcolonial Africa? How close, in any given case, is the relationship between literature and literacy? The editors borrow Wittgenstein’s analogy of family resemblances as a way of saving some connections, but they and their contributors are above all interested in difference. We could add a pair of questions from the same philosopher: “Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we need?” The chapter titles all name literatures and cultures, and in many cases languages, too—Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, English, and German. But how many languages are concealed in the words Indian or African? The larger groupings of the book reflect the lurking riddle. The first two sections identify areas of the world—East and South Asia and the Mediterranean. The third moves from place to language under the rubric of “Modern Vernaculars,” and the fourth, “Modern Geographies,” turns place into a kind of metaphor for complicated categories, namely, Latin American, African, African American, and World Literature. Commenting on this last shift, the editors say that “the birth of the modern nation-state” makes a huge difference to the world of literature and much else, “albeit in often uncomfortable and dissonant ways” (299). Yet three quarters of this book are devoted to cultures active before that birth. In such a context, the idea of the national classic often becomes curiously questionable. If we think of the place of the Chanson de Roland (composed around 1100) in countless histories of French literature, then it seems, as Simon Gaunt dryly says, “somewhat paradoxical that the earliest and most authoritative surviving manuscript was produced in England and written in ... Anglo-Norman” (242). Similarly, if we follow Michael Wachtel’s subtle suggestion, The Song of Igor’s Campaign (composed in 1185 or soon after) cannot really represent the beginning of Russian literature since it spent so much time in oblivion, being