Short description:

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?

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

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 Rousseau?s 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