Coming from the perspective of World Literature Studies, this essay views Ms. Marvel series as post-9/11 Muslim-American work whose iconography is deeply transnational. Situated in what Alexander Beecroft termed national literary ecology, Ms. Marvel contains strong features of what the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz called ‘transnational connections.’ Ms. Marvel is built, at its core, around the problematic of superhero iconography in relation to the gender and ethno-religious identity, in particular reductive stereotypes of Muslim identity in the post-9/11 USA. I argue that Ms. Marvel’s transnational character arises from a dynamic oscillation between a location in the American literary ecology and an orientation to globalised form of Islamic culture. The comic hybridises American superhero iconography with the ethos of her Islamic heritage and as such creates a rich transnational image-text that vies for a place in the developing ecology of global literature.

This book explores literary works and practices – always existing in the dynamic relation between locations and orientations – in a series of carefully designed case studies. Explicitly expressed or implied, manifesting itself sometimes as dislocation and disorientation, the claiming of space by any symbolic means necessary is revealed as a constant effect of literary endeavors. In dialogue with geopolitics of culture, sociology and anthropology, attention to literary locations and orientations brings spatial particularity into the study of world literatures.

These case studies demonstrate that four key terms (cosmopolitan, vernacular, location, orientation) can frame analyses of very different types of literary acts and texts in the contemporary period, allowing for distinctions that are not captured within the grids of other conceptual pairs like centre-periphery, local-global, postcolonial-metropolitan, North-South. With this framing, expressive practices in a wide range of regions – including Europe, Africa, the Middle East and the Pacific – are analysed in ways that bring out how spatiality is at stake in the cosmopolitan-vernacular dynamic.

A Bosnian Swedish writer considers how extreme nuances and barely perceptible differences, which signify no change in the core meaning of a word, still evoke connotations that widen gaps between us rather than allowing us to trivas with words.

When I was rather new to Sweden, with only a few years of refugee life behind me, I worked in a group of care assistants, and when one of us died, we all went to his funeral. The priest pulled out an electric guitar and played a famous pop song by Ulf Lundell, “Jag trivs bäst i öppna landskap.” I was lost for words, of course, but quite enjoyed it. My first big culture clash. The main verse translates roughly as “I best enjoy being in vast landscapes,” but the Swedish verb trivas really means to thrive, to grow, and in more everyday use to feel good and at home. You can trivas at work or trivas with someone. It signifies that everything is just Swedish lagom, just enough, balanced. It doesn’t ooze the intensity of strong love but evokes a preferred mood or a mode of being. Perhaps it is like that line of Raymond Carver, “In addition to being in love, we like each other and enjoy one another’s company.” I think there is a way to trivas with words and for words to trivas with you like you can trivas with someone you love. It hasn’t always been like that. There is also a way to live with words that make the ground arid. A way to always and utterly distrust words.

Following Eric Hayot's argument that modernity is a theory of the world as the universal, this paper traces the world concept in Marvel Comics industry (MC) and its synergy with the film industry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Speaking from the field of World Literature Studies, I show how superhero comics activate the world concept through the global dissemination of the infinitely stretchable Marvel Universe. My argument is that by operating in terms of a universe with moldable diegetic rules, the popular culture of MC and MCU does not merely reflect the current state of the world concept, but also affects its evolution and its spread. The universality of the modern worldview has come to be less concerned with the realist effect and more with increasing all-inclusiveness and infinite stretchability. The increased plasticity of the world concept puts a great pressure on world literary ecologies and increasingly expands and shapes what Beecroft called global literary ecology. What Marvel Comics has done in recent decades, especially through the interplay with the film industry, is to show how the expansion of the world concept entails that however large we imagine the world to be, it is always already too small.