This article presents methodologies towards a multilingual literary history of Sri Lanka in the twentieth century by examining multilingual encounters or cultures through places, people, and institutions. Massey's concept of plural space underpins the study and gives rise to various strategies to build a multilingual literary history. The guiding research questions are: How do we construct multilingual literary histories in the context of language-based conflict? What can conflict environments teach us about approaches to multilingual literary histories and spheres? In addition to discovering future directions for intra-national comparative literary studies and documenting multilingual cultures and sites, I also focus on the changing geography of multilingualism in the twentieth century. As ideological separation of language spheres turned to real-world segregation through a series of policy shifts and institutional changes, we see that the pursuit of multilingual research takes us from organic, or naturally occurring, sites of multilingualism to orchestrated, or purposefully created, sites. Orchestrated sites work to counterbalance the decreasing opportunity for organic multilingual encounters in the context of ethnolinguistic conflict.

中文翻译：

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迈向多语言文学史：冲突环境的教训

本文通过考察地点、人物和机构的多语种遭遇或文化，介绍了 20 世纪斯里兰卡多语种文学史的方法论。梅西的多元空间概念支撑了这项研究，并引发了构建多语言文学史的各种策略。指导性研究问题是：我们如何在基于语言的冲突背景下构建多语言文学史？关于多语言文学史和领域的方法，冲突环境能教给我们什么？除了发现国内比较文学研究的未来方向和记录多语言文化和遗址外，我还关注二十世纪多语言地理的变化。有机的或自然发生的多语种场所精心策划的或有目的地创建的网站。在民族语言冲突的背景下，精心安排的网站努力抵消有机多语言相遇机会的减少。