The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature is a collection of papers by influential scholars who are engaged in comparative literary studies and addresses a central and highly important question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to comparative literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem, of the discipline as well as of literary history, to accommodate non-Western traditions? Addressing this significant matter and taking different approaches in response to the state of the discipline, the papers in this volume offer diverse ways of overcoming Eurocentrism: the role of institutions and the changes they need to undergo; possible ways of practicing a truly global comparative literature; the history of the discipline outside Europe; premodern histories of ideas and the non-European origins of modernity; translation, orientalism and area studies; publishing and literary circulation; and modern technologies and their impact on literary dissemination and the discipline. This collection assesses comparative literature at a timely historical moment and will broaden the field by addressing the students and scholars of comparative literary studies all over the world with significant hints for more inclusive histories of world literature.
It is a collection of papers that addresses a central question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to Comparative Literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem to accommodate non-Western traditions?
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Comparative Literature Beyond Eurocentrism?
Part I: Institutions and Comparative Literature
1. Comparative Mobilities
2. Comparativism or What We Talk about When We Talk about Comparing
3. Provincializing the Buffered Self: Deep Eurocentrism and World Literature
4. World Literature and Global Anglophone Comparativism
Part II: Translation as Comparison, Comparison as Translation
5. No Good Paradigms! Untranslatability as Critical Praxis
6. Comparative Criticism Beyond Eurocentrism: In Search of the
Untranslatables of Literary Theory
7. Critical Terms and Their Resonances in Translation: The Case of "feng
8. Global Translation Zones: New Paradigms for Decentering Literary and
Translation History
9. Comparative Literature and Machine Translation
10. Reversing Linguistic Dependence: How Translated and Untranslated Chinese
Texts shaped Rousseaus Populism
Part III: Comparisons, Literatures: In Plural
11. Global Comparative Literature in a World of Pandemics
12. Contrapunctal Comparison
13. Towards a Non-Occidentocentric World Literature: Lessons from Soviet
Russia
14. World Literature and the Modernity Question
15. Comparing the West and Rest: Beyond Eurocentrism?
16. Centers, Peripheries, and Overlapping Peripheries of Different Centers:
Variations on "Word Literature" Models
17. Contactless Comparison
18. Comparing Literary Colonialisms: Located Multilingual Perspectives Beyond
Europe
19. North-South Comparatism: New Worldism, Theories of Lack and
Acclimatization
20. Comparing the Literatures of the Global South
Part IV: Worlds and Literary Historiographies
21. Overcoming Thresholds and the Mysterious Travels of Literary Influence:
Why National Canons Cannot be Projected onto the Big Canvas
22. Chinese Antecedents of Life Writing and the Western Genre
23. Vernacular Comparatism: The Secret History of Comparative Literature in
Colonial India, c. 1800-54
24. Environmental Comparative Literature
25. Forming a Significant Geography Across Modernist Poetry in Arabic and
Persian
26. Diasporic Difference: The Global Jewish Journey of Robinson Crusoe
27. Afro-Arab Circulations
28. The Challenge of Writing a World Literary History
Index
Zhang Longxi holds an MA in English from Peking University (1981) and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard (1989). He has taught at Peking, Harvard, the University of California, Riverside, and the City University of Hong Kong, and is currently Xiaoxiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University and Li De Chair Professor at the Yenching Academy of Peking University. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in 2009 and a foreign member of Academia Europaea in 2013. He was President of the International Comparative Literature Association from 20162019. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Literature and an Advisory Editor of New Literary History. He has published more than 20 books and numerous articles in both English and Chinese in East-West comparative studies. His books in English include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (1992); Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (1998); Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (2005); Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (2007); From Comparison to World Literature (2015), and more recently A History of Chinese Literature (2023) and World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (2024).
Omid Azadibougar was previously Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University. He is the author of The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014), World Literature and Hedayats Poetics of Modernity (2020), a co-editor of Persian Literature as World Literature (2021), and one of the founding editors and an editorial board member of Journal of World Literature.
