Multilingual literature that uses more than one alphabet or script system can be labelled as heterographic. The purpose of this article is to explore uses of heterographics as a literary device in a selection of Swedish picturebooks, published between 2013 and 2023. The intention is to exemplify different types of embedded heterographics. How are they shaped? Which functions do they fulfill? What impact may they have on the reading aloud of a picturebook? Guided by multimodal perspectives, as applied within literary multilingualism studies, intermedial studies, and picturebook research, reading aloud is regarded as a shared event. Both reader and listener are active and co-creative, as the visual-spatial dimension of the iconotext is realized in an auditory-temporal way. The article opens with a discussion of heterographics in relation to the page turn direction of picturebooks. Then four books in Swedish, which integrate Persian or Arabic script as well as an example of pseudo-script, are examined. It is demonstrated how heterographics may be inserted in the picturebooks’ verbal or visual texts, where they can take on aesthetic, thematic, and performative functions. In this way, they exhibit their beauty, contribute to strengthening themes of friendship and hope, or make readers experience similar feelings of threat or joy as the picturebooks’ characters, encountering scripts they do not know.

Konstantinopel, dagens Istanbul, är en stad som länge kännetecknats av att vara en plats för ekonomiska utbyten och politiska förhandlingar. Diplomatin delar i mångt och mycket skönlitteraturens kommunikativa och semiotiska villkor‚ dess grundläggande ”som om”-förhållande. Från dessa utgångspunkter undersöker artikeln några biografiskt, självbiografiskt och fiktivt inriktade texter från 1900-talets första decennier. Några av dem är de mycket lästa och spridda skildringarna av sultanen-och-självhärskaren Abdülhamid II, där skribenten bygger på att han personligen kommit makthavaren nära. De är skrivna av pseudonymerna Georges Dorys och Ali Nouri, som båda hamnade i onåd hos sultanen, samt av de svenska diplomaterna Fredrik Martin och Birger Mörner, båda verksamma vid svenska beskickningen i Konstantinopel. Därtill uppmärksammas den brittiske diplomaten och författaren Harold Nicolsons roman Sweet Waters (1921) och en av hans noveller ur Some People (1927), som båda utspelar sig i Konstantinopel och här diskuteras i termer av autobiografiktion, ett slags metafiktion på självbiografisk grund. Harold Nicolson var gift med Vita Sackville-West och tjänstgjorde i Konstantinopel under Balkankrigen 1912–1913.

This chapter explores the reception within modern culture of Russian Orthodox Christian funeral ritual and its hymnography, grounded in early Byzantine traditions. The selected examples of modern literary and musical works span from the 1940s to the 1990s. They are produced in Russian (Anna Akhmatova; Boris Pasternak), Swedish and Finland Swedish (Vera Alexandrova; Hagar Olsson), Church Slavonic (Krzysztof Penderecki), and English (John Tavener). Through their references to Orthodox funeral hymns and practices, a religious and cultural heritage that was severely threatened and almost destroyed by the atheistic communist state of the Soviet Union was remebered and activated anew. Due to their transfer into a secular semiosphere, the funerary texts gained new meanings and functions according to the norms and values which set the standards for modern culture. 

In Byzantine hymnography, the Theotokos is represented not only as a Virgin and Mother. She is often imagined as a city, a Byzantine cityscape—possibly Constantinople—modelled on Jerusalem, the heavenly city. This chapter aims to present and discuss some examples from Byzantine hymnography and Orthodox liturgical practice, where the Theotokos is represented in spatial verbal images as a city with its architectural structures, or is praised as a “living city”, that is, enspirited or ensouled (Gr. empsychos). Its exploration is inspired by intermedial studies, where verbal and visual arts are understood as necessarily interacting and inseparably intertwined, and reflects recent research in which sacred space in Byzantium is regarded as participative. It is demonstrated that the Theotokos is represented as a city in Byzantine hymnography, while in liturgical practice she is at the same time praised by the city itself within the city. The praising of the Theotokos as a “living city” carries not only theological meanings but also activates Constantinople and other historical Mediterranean towns as enspirited in the minds and cultural memory of Orthodox Christians.

This open access book positions itself at the intersection of world literature studies, literary anthropology and philosophical critiques of 'world' and 'globe' concepts. Doing so, it investigates how literature imagines and shapes worlds for its readers through linguistically specific cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamics, both at the level of textual engagement and on a material level of textual production and circulation. Moving from textual analyses in Part One – 'Worlds in Texts' – to combined analyses of texts, media and agents in the literary field in Part Two – 'Texts in Worlds' – the concerns of these nine chapters range from multilingualism, genre and style to material forms such as the little magazine or the scrapbook archive and finally to activities such as travel (as a writing profession) and literary promotion. 

With this focus on practice – which geographically engages with Constantinople, China, Russia, western Europe, North America, southern Africa and India – contributors demonstrate methodologically how world literature studies can bring the empirically specific detail to bear on global modes of analysis. It is precisely through such a dual optic that the world-making capacity of literature becomes apparent.

Bodin explores a case of literary world-making which transgresses the languages of national literatures. She examines four novels by Theotokas in Greek, Yessayan in Armenian, Edib Adıvar in Turkish and Zdanevich in Russian. They are all set in Constantinople between 1908 and 1922, a period which meant a protracted political crisis for the then still multilingual, multi-ethnic and multireligious city. By positing Constantinople’s narrated site before the fall of the Ottoman Empire as a Bakhtinian chronotope of threshold, Bodin studies how time and space are fused with language and agency in the selected novels. Irrespective of the author’s ethnicity or the novel’s language, the analyses demonstrate that the novels deploy displaced narration, and that they recollect or reclaim a lost world. Thereby, the act of writing itself is challenged, questioned or interrupted. Together, these novels make a linguistically multifaceted contribution to world literature and crafts Constantinople as a literary world.