The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges

Most known for his creative fictions that tackle literary questions of authorship as well as more philosophical notions such as multiverse theory, Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) has captivated scholars from a variety of disciplines since his emergence on the international scene. However, much of the scholarship surrounding Borges does not focus on the reception of Borges’s works in the fields of philosophy, the visual arts, film, political science, media theory, mathematics, and law, nor do it consider how his affiliations and interests changed over the course of his long life.

In The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges, editors Daniel Balderston and Nora Benedict, along with a team of international scholars, contextualize Jorge Luis Borges’s work for a new generation of twenty-first-century readers and critics. This volume shifts the emphasis to Borges’s working life, his writing processes, his collaborations and networks, and the political and cultural background of his production. The Handbook also evaluates his impact on a variety of other fields ranging from political science and philosophy to media studies and mathematics. The volume highlights current debates among Borges scholars, reevaluating how the physical forms and socio-political contexts of Borges’s writings both shaped and determined specific readerships around the world. Incorporating such broader perspectives into the Handbook brings out tensions, continuities, and discontinuities in Borges’s work, allowing for a much more nuanced understanding of it.

Daniel Balderston is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Modern Languages at the University of Pittsburgh, where he directs the Borges Center and its journal Variaciones Borges. He earned his B.A. in English from the University of California-Berkeley and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton. He has published or edited fifteen books on Borges, and has published widely on other writers including José Bianco, Silvina Ocampo, Augusto Roa Bastos, Ricardo Piglia, Juan José Saer and Juan Carlos Onetti, as well as on translation studies and sexuality studies. Much of his recent work focuses on Borges’s manuscripts.

Nora Benedict is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia. She received her MA in Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her Ph.D. in Spanish from the University of Virginia. Her research centers on Latin American literature, book history, and digital and print cultures. Her first monograph, Borges and the Literary Marketplace (Yale, 2021), explains how the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges’s general involvement in the publishing industry influenced his formation as a writer and global book markets. Beyond her research on Borges, her second monograph in progress, Taking a Page from Their Books, examines how international publishing firms in the Global North capitalized on the economic, political, and cultural opportunities available to them in the book industry in Latin America. For her accomplishments in research at UGA, she recently was awarded the Michael F. Adams Early Career Scholar Award.