Odiya Literary Culture in the World Traditions

The literary culture of any region or nation is shaped by its literature, oral and written. It may be limited to a specific location, but the literature on which it is grounded has no frontiers. No literature, writer or literary text is limited to a local context, or culture. A literary artifact or author worth the name has a universal status. Homer, Dante, Sarala Das, Shakespeare, Fakir Mohan Senapati, Rabindranath Thakur, Kuntala Kumari Sabat, or Basant Kumari Patnaik is a world author. That is not just a contemporary viewpoint; Marx also thought so. According to him, “The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one sidedness and narrow mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures there arises a world literature.” With the emergence of a global view in the postcolonial ethos, the contemporary reader is more than ever inclined, to take such an enlightened view of all literatures of the world.