Some forms of literature interfere with the workings of the
literate brain, posing a challenge to readers of all kinds,
including professional literary critics. In Artefacts of Writing,
Peter D. McDonald argues they pose as much of a challenge to the
way states conceptualise language, culture, and community. Drawing
on a wealth of evidence, from Victorian scholarly disputes over the
identity of the English language to the constitutional debates
about its future in Ireland, India, and South Africa, and from the
quarrels over the idea of culture within the League of Nations in
the interwar years to UNESCO's ongoing struggle to articulate a
viable concept of diversity, McDonald brings together a large
ensemble of legacy writers, including T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and
Rabindranath Tagore, putting them in dialogue with each other and
with the policy-makers who shaped the formation of modern states
and the history of internationalist thought from the 1860s to the
1940s. In the second part of the book, he reflects on the
continuing evolution of these dialogues, showing how a varied array
of more contemporary writers from Amit Chaudhuri, J. M. Coetzee,
and Salman Rushdie to Antjie Krog, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and
Es'kia Mphahlele cast new light on a range of questions concerning
education, literacy, human rights, translation, indigenous
knowledge, and cultural diversity that have preoccupied UNESCO
since 1945. At once a novel contribution to institutional and
intellectual history and an innovative exercise in literary and
philosophical analysis, Artefacts of Writing affords a unique
perspective on literature's place at the centre of some of the most
fraught, often lethal public controversies that defined the
long-twentieth century and that continue to haunt us today
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