World Literature According to Wikipedia Popularity and Book Translations: The Case of Modern Italian Poets

Abstract

Most studies of world literature ignore statistics about the translation, circulation and reception of literary works, since no way exists to find such information on a global scale. Because of this, Western scholars generally assume that certain figures are canonical everywhere in the world, such as Shakespeare and Dante. This paper proposes a new and different approach to the study of literary canonicity, by drawing on an almost completely untapped dataset (the 310 global Wikipedias) and comparing Wikipedia popularity and newly collected data on book translations. By examining diverse measures of global popularity of a corpus of 101 modern Italian poets, I aim both to integrate a new resource (Wikipedia) into the study of world literature as well as to newly problematize the very concept of world literature. I will show how shifting one's criterion of canonicity – whether the number of translations or the number of Wikipedia pageviews of an author – affects our understanding of what makes an author canonical or not. In the end, I argue, we have not yet developed a subtle enough way to determine the canonicity of authors. But this dual strategy of comparing translations and Wikipedia popularity does show us a potential way forward.