Winner of the 2018 Book Award awarded by the American Association for Applied Linguistics

The Invention of Monolingualism harnesses literary studies, applied linguistics, translation studies, and cultural studies to offer a groundbreaking investigation of monolingualism. After briefly describing what "monolingual” means in scholarship and public discourse, and the pejorative effects this common use may have on non-elite and cosmopolitan populations alike, David Gramling sets out to discover a new conception of monolingualism. Along the way, he explores how writers—Turkish, Latin-American, German, and English-language—have in recent decades confronted monolingualism in their texts, and how they have critiqued the World Literature industry’s increasing hunger for “translatable” novels.