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.

ed. Johannes D. Kaminski

The utopian appeal of peace, both in a political and spiritual sense, belongs to the powerful drivers of the human imagination. Yet the rhetorics of peace are difficult to untangle from the realities of war; after all, efforts that supposedly serve a higher purpose frequently result in injustice and violence. In the present issue, an international group of scholars discusses European, American, and Chinese texts that cover a wide spectrum of imagined peace, ranging from naïve enthusiasm for top-down solutions to dejected elegies for the demise of civil liberties.

The journal was published within the project SASPRO World Government: Grand Narratives in Contemporary Science-Fiction.

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: 24 €

Articles:
ALEXIS SHOTWELL
“All we have is means”: Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopianism as ongoingness
KILIAN JÖRG
Messy utopianism and the question of war: What does “staying with the trouble” mean in relation to war?
JOHANNES D. KAMINSKI
World-wide conflicts, insular solutions: Universalizing government, language and race in
H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia and Kang Youwei’s The Great Unity
GABRIEL F. Y. TSANG
Mind and peace: The “democratic” info-technological determinism of Gu Junzheng’s “The Dream of Peace”
MICHAEL KA-CHI CHEUK
The Chinese Nobel complex and peacebuilding: Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan as case studies
CATHERINE MACMILLAN
Everyone’s watching you: The future of society in Dave Eggers’s The Every
ANTON MATEJICKA
Totalitarian systems and their peaceful alternatives in Karin Boye’s Kallocain and Olga Ravn’s The Employees
MAGDALENA MÜHLBÖCK
The terrible within the peaceful: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara
ADAM ŠKROVAN
The pursuit of harmony: Groups and communities in post-apocalyptic narratives
ELAHEH KARIMI RIABI
The image of Persian women in Lomnitsky’s travelogue Persia and Persians

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

eds. Ivana Hostová ‒ Mária Kusá

This issue with a focus on translation studies explores the intersection of translation with power, censorship, and marginalized identities. The articles investigate how translation can reinforce or resist oppressive structures, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Themes include the curation of cultural exports, censorship in literary translation, and the political economy of reception. The issue also highlights the role of translators in shaping theoretical works, and advocates for the decolonization of knowledge and greater inclusivity in global cultural production.

The journal was published within the project VEGA 2/0092/23 Translation and translating in the history and present of the Slovak cultural space. Transformations of forms, status and functions: texts, personalities, institutions.

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: 24 €

Articles:

IVANA HOSTOVÁ ‒ MÁRIA KUSÁ
Translation, censorship, and marginalized voices: Challenging power and
economic barriers
IRYNA ODREKHIVSKA
Decolonial analytics in translation history: Ukrainian literature in the contested
space of English translation
NATALIIA RUDNYTSKA
Soviet ideological and puritanical censorship of Ukrainian literary translations
MARIE KRAPPMANN
Individual decisions in a collectivist ideology: Two Czech translations of I. L. Peretz’s
short story Bontshe shvayg
MERVE ÖZENÇ KASIMOĞLU
Words in time: Inclusive reading and rewriting in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
KATARÍNA BEDNÁROVÁ
Translation as a scholarly dialogue
IVANA HOSTOVÁ
Translated, transgressed, transported: A century of Whitman in Slovakia
JÁN GAVURA
Publishing poetry in translation in Slovakia 2013–2023
IVANA HOSTOVÁ ‒ DANIELE MONTICELLI ‒ OLEKSANDR KALNYCHENKO
‒ MARTIN DJOVČOŠ
Addressing power imbalances in research and translation studies
EVA VEREBOVÁ ‒ EMÍLIA PEREZ
Theater performances and their accessibility in Slovakia: Insights from the Deaf
community

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