Literatures are rather improbable things. While storytelling and myth making
seem to be fixtures of human society, literatures are much more rare. After all,
very few spoken languages ever developed a script, let alone enduring institutions of the kind surveyed in this volume. And in those instances where a
literary tradition does take hold, survival is far from guaranteed. Literatures
require technologies for their preservation and circulation, groups interested
in their continuing production, audiences invested in their consumption, and
so on. Literatures are sustained over time by diverse practices. But much like
individual lives or entire cultures, they also experience birth and death, periods
of florescence and of decay, migration from one place to another, and transformation from one shape into another.
With all the specialized interest in individual literatures, in addition to the
widespread use of big-picture categories like postcolonial and world literature, one can easily lose track of just how strange it is that literatures exist in
the first place. This book embraces such strangeness, asking how an array of
literatures, extending across time and space, came to be. By examining the
factors that have brought forth and kept alive various literary traditions, the
case studies presented here provide the occasion to rethink many of our most
basic assumptions about literature in the singular and literatures in the plural.