In this booklet, Marc Caplan argues that the literatures of ostensibly marginal sleek cultures are key to realizing modernism. Caplan undertakes an remarkable comparability of nineteenth-century Yiddish literature and twentieth-century Anglophone and Francophone African literature and divulges unforeseen similarities among them. those literatures have been created lower than imperial regimes that introduced with them tactics of modernization that have been already good complex somewhere else. Yiddish and African writers reacted to the releasing power of modernity and the burdens of imperial authority via making a choice on related narrative genres, regularly corresponding to early-modern eu literatures: the picaresque, the pseudo-autobiography, satire, and the Bildungsroman. either exhibit analogous anxieties towards language, stuck as they have been among imperial, "global" languages and stigmatized local vernaculars, and among traditions of writing and orality. via comparative readings of narratives by means of Reb Nakhman of Breslov, Amos Tutuola, Yisroel Aksenfeld, Cheikh Hamidou Kane, Isaac Meyer Dik, Camara Laye, Mendele Moykher-Sforim, Wole Soyinka, Y. Y. Linetski, and Ahmadou Karouma, Caplan demonstrates that those literatures' "belated" courting to modernization indicates their power to count on next crises within the modernity and post-modernity of metropolitan cultures. This, in flip, leads him to suggest a brand new theoretical version, peripheral modernism, which includes either a brand new knowing of "periphery" and "center" in modernity and a brand new technique for comparative literary feedback and idea.