Literary Zones: M. Yourcenar and the Concept of World Literature

The paper examines the French writer Marguerite Yourcenar as an example of world literature, going through three steps. The first step is to question why Marguerite Yourcenar is one of the authors included in David Damrosch’s “Around the World in 80 Books”. The second step is looking at the notion of world literature through the concepts of Harold Bloom’s “The West- ern Canon”, Ognyan Kovachev’s “Literature and Identity Transformations of Otherness”, and Galin Tihanov’s “Beyond Circulation”. The third step reads Yourcenar’s method as being in line with the idea of literary zones and zonality.