Introduction

This introduction examines the two main questions explored in the special issue: What does the Cold War's interweaving of international politics and global war disclose about contemporary world literature discourse? What does world literature (as idea, program, and, more importantly, as reality of writing and reading beyond the framework of the nation-state) tell us about the Cold War and its discursive reliance on rhetorical ambiguity? We depart from the major approaches to literature's relationship with the Cold War that focuses on how the latter is represented by literature or how literature responds to the Cold War. We also do not simplistically consider the Cold War as only naming an epoch in world history, or world literature as the totality of literary works and circulation networks spurred by a partly frozen global conflict at the heart of the twentieth century.