A Companion to Mediterranean History, First Edition. Edited by Peregrine Horden and Sharon Kinoshita.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
chapter twenty
What is Mediterranean literature? None of the key works of the emerging discipline
of Mediterranean Studies—neither Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean (1972–3) nor
Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000) nor David
Abulafia’s The Great Sea (2011)—has much to say about texts we would call literary
and, as a sub-field, Mediterranean Studies has found less purchase in literature than
among historians in many sub-disciplines (Kinoshita, 2009: 600). This belatedness
reflects the tenacity in literary studies of the nation—with its ideal, if rarely realized,
presumptions about the homogeneity of language, “ethnicity,” and religion—as the
default category of analysis. Institutionalized in departments of national literatures or
by philological (Romance languages) or area studies (Near Eastern or East Asian
languages) groupings, literary studies as currently configured are ill-equipped to
explore certain kinds of texts and issues. “Mediterranean literature,” then, is a project
of reterritorialization.^1 By displacing the nation as the default category of analysis, it
brings into view the patchwork of principalities, city-states, and empires—often
multilingual, multi-ethnic, or multi-confessional—that comprise the pre- and early
modern Mediterranean. As in the case of visual studies, this shift calls forth different
models and questions, better attuned to the specificity and significance of the trans-
mission of texts across cultures and “reconceptualized over time and in different
places” (Hilsdale, this volume).
This chapter maps out some of the forms that something called “Mediterranean
literature” might take. Against the background of Mediterranean multilingualism and
connectivity, it raises questions of translation, text networks and the transmission of
genres, and the treatment of literary motifs crafted around or shaped by Mediterranean
experiences of connectivity and interaction, including piracy, slavery, and commerce.
The choice of specific issues and examples, it is important to emphasize, is neither
comprehensive nor definitive but illustrative: a framework for future work that will
bring other texts, languages, and periods into better focus than is possible here
(Kinoshita, 2009: 601, 606–607).
Mediterranean Literature
SHaron kinoSHita