eds. Ivana Hostová – Mária Kusá – Eva Spišiaková

How do translated voices travel, and who makes that movement possible? This issue explores translation as a socially embedded practice shaped by editors, publishers, and literary networks. Focusing on periodicals and the mediation of less central literatures, the contributions examine how translator visibility, editorial agendas, and ideological mediation influence the circulation of texts across borders. The articles show how translation fosters aesthetic innovation, generates intertextual connections, and reshapes literary canons, while the co-authored roundtable evaluates the promises and limits of studying translation in periodicals, particularly through digital methods.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 40 €

Articles:
LUC VAN DOORSLAER – TRIIN VAN DOORSLAER
The translator as a multilingual and ideological chameleon: The case of Vladimir Beekman
GAËTAN C. REGNIERS
“The Dutch read anything from an unfamiliar language”: Literary translation, media constraints, and professional trajectories in the interwar press
JINQUAN YU
The visibility of Ida Pruitt as a woman translator: An archival approach to the English translation of Lao She’s Si Shi Tong Tang
Continue reading World Literature Studies 3/2026: Mediating Voices: Translation, Representation, and Change →

eds. Jakub Kapičiak ‒ Akvilė Rėklaitytė

To discuss the rhetoric of sincerity, it is necessary to focus on
the means that create the effect of genuine and honest (self-)disclosures. This issue explores literary representations of sincerity across Central and Eastern Europe from the late 19th century to the present. The articles, dealing with Bulgarian, Czech, Lithuanian, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, and Ukrainian literatures, demonstrate how the public disclosure of private feelings functions as a powerful communicative principle. Moving beyond its common association with contemporary post-postmodern paradigms, they explore sincerity as an unstable, relational, and highly context-dependent category.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 40 €

Articles:
GERTRAUDE ZAND
Sincerity in Czech literature: Notes toward a rhetoric of lamentation
KRISTIYAN YANEV
(In)sincerity as a narrative strategy in Karol Irzykowski’s “Sny Marii Dunin. Palimpsest”
MARIE ZETOVÁ
Giving an account of oneself through the eyes of the other: On sincerity in Bohumil Hrabal’s
autobiographical trilogy
DALIA SATKAUSKYTĖ
The cultural and political value of sincerity in the literature of Soviet Lithuania
JAKUB MIKULECKÝ
The rhetoric of sincerity in Bulgarian underground literature from the 1960s to the 1980s
ŠIMON ČIŽMÁR
Experimenting with life: New sincerity in contemporary Slovak poetry
EVA KENDERESSY
Is there “sincerity” in the literary imagery of Mircea Cărtărescu’s novel Solenoid?
OLHA VOZNYUK
Sincerity in poetry amid Russia’s war against Ukraine: Svidchennia of Victoria Amelina

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

eds. Anikó Dušíková ‒ Dobrota Pucherová

The topic of this issue focuses on the question of Slovak literature’s position in world literature: i.e. what is the relationship between the national and the global context? In the search for an answer, the studies find that neither “worldliness” nor “Slovakness” are self-evident attributes. The contributions show a spectrum of possible ways of looking at Slovak literature as part of the world literary system: through interliterary relations, cultural transfer, transculturalism, Christian spirituality, Slavic identity, feminism and cosmopolitism. They problematize concepts such as “center/periphery”, “minor” or “belated”, and undermine a hegemonic understanding of world literature

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 40 €

Articles:
MILOSLAV VOJTECH
Básnici slovenskí a svetoví: Ján Hollý, Ján Kollár a Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav ako aktéri
európskeho kultúrneho transferu
MARTA FÜLÖPOVÁ
Predstava o slovanskej svetovej literatúre ako základe slovenskej národnej identity
podľa Ľudovíta Štúra Continue reading World Literature Studies 4/2025: Slovak Literature in Inter-Literary and Transcultural Contexts →

eds. Olha Voznyuk ‒ Kristina Vorontsova

Since the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, literature has served both as a means of revealing trauma and for documenting social and cultural transformations during times of crisis. This issue gathers studies by Ukrainian scholars who analyze these literary processes from an insider’s perspective and offer strategies for reconstructing and consolidating national and cultural identity. The articles devoted to the latest Ukrainian literature present a body of scholarship on wartime experiences, giving voice to diverse narrative perspectives reflecting the nature of both collective and individual trauma.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 40 €

Articles:
MARYNA RIABCHENKO
Combatant prose as an important component of the contemporary Ukrainian literary process
OLENA ROMANENKO
Narrative and war: The experience of contemporary Ukrainian literature
SWITŁANA HAJDUK
Discourse on the traumatic experience of Ukrainian internally displaced and refugee women: A Foe – A Friend – A Family by Iryna Feofanova
TETIANA GREBENIUK
The motif of orphanhood in the narrative of trauma and healing: Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s fiction about Russia’s war against Ukraine
OLHA VOZNYUK
Narratives of war in the poetry of Svitlana Povaliayeva and Yuliya Musakovska
TETIANA RIAZANTSEVA – YEVHENIIA KANCHURA
Poetic reflections of war in contemporary Ukrainian literature as the poetry of metaphysical perspectives
SVITLANA PIDOPRYGORA
Mission accomplished? Ukrainian superhero comics in times of war
YULIIA LABETSKA – MARIIA NIKOLCHENKO
National identity and resistance in Mykola Akhbash’s original and translated Rumeika-language poetry
OLESIA VEKLYCH
The topos of Mariupol in Ukrainian and Italian military literature: Comparative aspects
IVANA HOSTOVÁ et al.
Beyond the market: Translation and cultural resistance in Slovak periodicals
MILOŠ ZELENKA – KLAUDIA KLAMÁROVÁ
The Many Languages of Comparative Literature: A valuable contribution to discussions
of world literature

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

eds. Roman Mikuláš ‒ Rolf Parr

The studies on the topic of this issue give rise to a discussion of the extent to which the often postulated dominance of the life sciences affects the position of literary studies (and thus literature) in the current system of disciplines and their discourses and whether literary studies themselves can be understood as a type of life knowledge. From an interdiscursive perspective, the articles point to parallels between the discursive status of literature and that of the life sciences, since both combine specific discourses into new entities. The process of reflection brings up questions: what legitimizes the supposedly dominant position of the life sciences in the 21st century, and what are the prerequisites and forms of a fully-fledged communication between literature, literary studies, and life sciences?

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 40 €

Articles:
OTTMAR ETTE
Warum die Literaturwissenschaft eine Lebenswissenschaft ist
AMELIE BENDHEIM – DIETER HEIMBÖCKEL
Auf Herz und Nerven. Zur Literaturgeschichte der Ohnmacht
MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS
Aussterben. Über Literarisierungen eines liminalen Lebenswissens
ESTERA GŁUSZKO-BOZCOŃ
Zwischen Gesundheitsdiktatur, Ökoterrorismus und individueller Freiheit: Lebenswissenschaften in Juli Zehs Corpus Delicti und Dirk C. Flecks GO! – Die Ökodiktatur
MILUŠE JUŘÍČKOVÁ
Klimatický diskurs v zrcadle současných norských textů
FANG WAN
Towards a Global South posthumanism: The more-than-human world in Han Song’s
Red Ocean and Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men
ROMAN MIKULÁŠ
Vergessen als Gegenstand der Lebenswissenschaften und der Literaturwissenschaft: Dargestellt am Roman Noras Gedächtnis von Dorothea Zeppezauer
JOSEF FULKA
Láska, afekt, text: nad několika textovými motivy v Rousseauově Julii
ALENA KYSELICOVÁ
Teória krátkej prózy v medzinárodnom kontexte

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

ed. Oksana Blashkiv

What is the global campus today? What are its representations in fiction? What do they say about the university’s role in contemporary society? This issue devoted to the campus novel searches for answers in contemporary Anglophone and particularly non-Anglophone campus fiction in its plurality and diversity. The relevance of the topic is explained by the significant changes that the world of academia and its literary narratives undergo in the present. By bringing attention to campus fiction in Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, German, Czech, Bulgarian, and American literature, the authors shed light on the global campus and national peculiarities of its portrayal.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 40 €

Articles:
MERRITT MOSELEY
Globalism, then and now: The rise of international neoliberalism and the academic novel
OKSANA BLASHKIV
Central European perspectives of the global campus: Slavic academic fiction after 1989
ANNA GAIDASH
Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s
ELŻBIETA PERKOWSKA-GAWLIK
The academic murder mystery as a popular subgenre from the Polish perspective
PETR HRTÁNEK
The campus novel and university satire in recent Czech literature
CORINA SELEJAN
Magical realism and the othering of the academic in three Romanian postcommunist novels
MARTA KOVAL
The American university in the aftermath of 9/11 in Susan Choi’s novel A Person of Interest
PETR ANTÉNE
“The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls
PAULÍNA ŠEDÍKOVÁ ČUHOVÁ – MARTINA KUBEALAKOVÁ
The Perlmann crisis of the academic world
EWALD MENGEL
The university as heterotopia in Tabea Mußgnug’s Nächstes Semester wird alles anders…
JULIE HANSEN
A tale of two professions in the Swedish campus novel Vård, skola och omsorg
MILENA KIROVA
The phenomenon of the “Professorenroman” in Bulgarian literature

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.