An Overview of Literary Multilingualism

The study of literary works involving two or more languages, a phenomenon that has been historically much more abundant than we might think, raises a variety of problems that critics have often minimized or ignored, such as the difficulties that texts written in different languages cause when we want to ascribe them to a particular national literature. This article aims to present and classify this heterogeneous procedure, present in all periods of the history of literature, and to evaluate the various intentions behind it. It studies the forms of literary multilingualism (alternation, confusion and language mixture) and the purposes that guide them (rhetorics of display, desire for verisimilitude, willingness to parody, a reflection of diglossia), with reference to a variety of examples from different literatures.