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.
Edited by:
Zhang Longxi,
Omid Azadibougar
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 254mm,
Width: 178mm,
Weight: 940g
ISBN: 9781032231624
ISBN 10: 1032231629
Series: Routledge Literature Companions
Pages: 406
Publication Date: 28 April 2025
Audience:
College/higher education
,
Primary
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
List of Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Zhang Longxi and Omid Azadibougar: “Comparative Literature Beyond Eurocentrism” Section 1: Institutions and Comparative Literature 1. Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas: “Comparative Mobilities” 2. Ben Hutchinson: “Comparativism or What We Talk about When We Talk about Comparing” 3. Ken Seigneurie: “Provincializing the Buffered Self: Deep Eurocentrism and World Literature” 4. Debjani Ganguly: “World Literature and Global Anglophone Comparativism” Section 2: Translation as Comparison, Comparison as Translation 5. Emily Apter: “No Good Paradigms: Untranslatability as Critical Praxis” 6. Thomas Beebee: “Comparative Criticism beyond Eurocentrism: In Search of the Untranslatables of Literary Theory” 7. Liu Yan: “Critical Terms and their Resonance in Translation: The Case of feng” 8. Diana Roig Sanz and Ana Kvirikashvili Chitishvili: “Global Translation Zones: New Paradigms for Decentering Literary and Translation History” 9. Suman Gupta: “Comparative Literature and Machine Translation” 10. Martin Powers: “Reversing Linguistic Dependence: How Translated and Untranslated Chinese Texts shaped Rousseau’s Populism” Section 3: Comparisons, Litratures: In Plural 11. Karen Thornber: “Global Comparative Literature in a World of Pandemics” 12. David Damrosch: “Contrapunctal Comparison” 13. Galin Tihanov: “Towards a Non-Occidentocentric World Literature: Lessons from 14. World Literature and the Modernity Question, Firat Oruc 15. Theo D'haen: “Comparing the “West” and “Rest”: Beyond Eurocentrism?” 16. Haun Saussy: “Centers, Peripheries, and Overlapping Peripheries of Different Centers: Variations on ‘Word Literature’ Models” 17. Alexander Beecroft: “Contactless Comparison” 18. Francesca Orsini, “Comparing Literary Colonialisms: Located Multilingual Perspectives beyond Europe 19. José Luís Jobim, “North-South Comparatism: New Worldism, Theories of Lack and Acclimatization” 20. Wail S. Hassan: “Comparing the Literatures of the Global South” Section 4: Worlds and Literary Historiographies 21. Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: “Overcoming Thresholds and the Mysterious Travels of Literary Influences: Why National Canons Cannot be Projects onto the Big Canvas” 22. Alfred Hornung: “Chinese Antecedents of Life Writing and the Werstern Genre” 23. Baidik Bhattacharya: “Vernacular Comparatism: The Secret History of Comparative Literature in Colonial India, c. 1800-54” 24. Cesar Dominguez: “Environmental Comparative Literature” 25. Levi Thompson: “Forming a Significant Geography across Modernist Poetry in Arabic and Persian” 26. Lital Levy: “Diasporic Difference: The Global Jewish Journey of Robinson Crusoe” 27. Marie Thérèse Abdelmessih: “Afro-Arab Circulations” 28. Zhang Longxi: “Challenge of Writing a History of World Lit” 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 2016–2019. 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 Hedayat’s 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.
