1st Edition

The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature

Edited By Zhang Longxi, Omid Azadibougar Copyright 2025
422 Pages
by Routledge

422 Pages
by Routledge

422 Pages
by Routledge

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... Read more

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Comparative Literature beyond Eurocentrism?

Zhang Longxi and Omid Azadibougar

PART I

Institutions and Comparative Literature

1 Comparative Mobilities

Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas

2 Comparativism or What We Talk about When We Talk about Comparing

Ben Hutchinson

3 Provincializing the Buffered Self: Deep Eurocentrism and World Literature

Ken Seigneurie

4 World Literature and Global Anglophone Comparativism

Debjani Ganguly

PART II

Translation as Comparison, Comparison as Translation

5 No Good Paradigms! Untranslatability as Critical Praxis

Emily Apter

6 Comparative Criticism Beyond Eurocentrism: In Search of the

Untranslatables of Literary Theory

Thomas Oliver Beebee

7 Critical Terms and Their Resonances in Translation: The Case of “feng

Yan Liu

8 Global Translation Zones: New Paradigms for Decentering Literary and Translation History

Diana Roig- Sanz and Ana Kvirikashvili

9 Comparative Literature and Machine Translation

Suman Gupta

10 Reversing Linguistic Dependence: How Translated and Untranslated Chinese Texts Shaped Rousseau’s Populism

Martin Powers 包華石

PART III

Comparisons, Literatures: In Plural

11 Global Comparative Literature in a World of Pandemics

Karen Thornber

12 Contrapuntal Comparison

David Damrosch

13 Towards a Non- Occidentocentric World Literature: Lessons fromSoviet Russia

Galin Tihanov

14 World Literature and the Modernity Question

Firat Oruc

15 Comparing “West” and “Rest”: Beyond Eurocentrism?

Theo D’haen

16 Centers, Peripheries and Overlapping Peripheries of Different Centers: Variations on “World Literature” Models

Haun Saussy

17 Contactless Comparison

Alexander Beecroft

18 Comparing Literary Colonialisms: Located and Multilingual

Perspectives beyond Europe

Francesca Orsini

19 North- South Comparatism: New Worldism, Theories of Lack and Acclimatization

Jose Luis Jobim

20 Comparing the Literatures of the Global South

Wail S. Hassan

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

Mads Rosendahl Thomsen

22 Chinese Antecedents of Life Writing and the Western Genre

Alfred Hornung

23 Vernacular Comparatism: The Secret History of Comparative Literature in Colonial India, c. 1800–54

Baidik Bhattacharya

24 Environmental Comparative Literature

Cesar Dominguez

25 Forming a Significant Geography Across Modernist Poetry in Arabic and Persian

Levi Thompson

26 Diasporic Difference: The Global Jewish Journey of Robinson Crusoe

Lital Levy

27 Afro- Arab Circulations

Marie Therese Abdelmessih

28 The Challenge of Writing a World Literary History

Zhang Longxi

Index

 

Biography

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.