Introduction: Cross-Cultural Reading

It is a truth universally acknowledged that culture shapes the way we tell, share, and understand stories. The structures of stories and the conditions under which they are transmitted and read are all quite different depending on the geographical location, time period, and culture in which they originated. For literary studies, the handling of a vast variety of literature from all around the world is the cornucopia for its teaching and research.

It is a wealth that has been merely a minor interest for literary studies for decades. In particular, the sensitivity for a variety of cross-cultural readings has only been treated as a margin in literary studies. For instance, it is nearly impossible to write only about the history of the nineteenth century novels in Europe from Finland to Turkey, because the bibliographies of books shared throughout Europe do not exist. At the same time, we only have limited knowledge on how and to what extent readers from Asian backgrounds understand the same stories in different ways compared to Westerners. Do readers from diverse cultural settings differ in the understanding of topics, do they differ in understanding the characters and plots, or does culture shape the reading in some dimensions, but not in others? Even more general questions on whether cultural reading habits exist have not been extensively investigated in literary studies. In addition to the general claims on reading "between" cultures, literary studies have a poor understanding of what cultural differences in reading means.

It is noteworthy that systematic cross-cultural studies of reading literature remain rather uncommon, despite the diversity of literatures and their readers. In contrast to linguistics, where the mapping of the world's languages and the differences in the use of languages are major research tasks in projects such as DoBeS, HRELP, TLA and WALS,¹ no world atlas of literature exists to document the diversity of literatures as well as their readers. However, under other names, a variety of approaches have mapped the differences and intersections in the reading of literatures across the globe.

A common attempt in literary studies is to explore how literature "reads" other literatures and other cultural traditions. The interpretation of colonialism in the literary works of Joseph Conrad, the reception of remote civilization in early modern travel books, the analysis of topics such as the Irish in America or of the genre in the vein of Montesquieu's Lettres persane are all subjects and objects of literary studies. In this kind of hermeneutical interpretation of literary works, scholars analyze how authors make use of other literatures and other cultures and to what extent literature underwent cultural adaptations in the process. In more historically oriented literary studies, asymmetric historical exchanges between literary texts are taken into focus, such as the history of the May Fourth Movement and its impact on writing modern literature in China, or with another focus, Salman Rushdie's adaptation of Günter Grass' The Tin Drum. Questions of identity and stereotyping are not seldom part of this kind of historical imagology. In the approaches that have been very briefly outlined, literary studies scrutinize the cultural tradeoff between literatures. Not the readers, but the authors as cross-cultural readers are the object of this kind of research.

A great deal in the field of comparative literary studies, which might also count as cross-cultural reading studies, follows the fundamental insight, which is to determine how limited the national paradigm of literary history is. In many cases, it is not literature in the same language that serves as a model for aesthetic innovations, but the literature from a neighboring country. In the eighteenth century, French literature taught German authors how to write better dramas. Herder's aesthetic was inspired by the aesthetics of Shaftesbury. The list could easily go on. In this sense, comparative literary studies are cross-cultural studies by definition. Since translation is a major source for the kind of reading that crosses languages and cultures, translation (and interpretation) studies are another approach that deals with crosscultural reading. Translation studies analyze how one literary text is translated into another, and...