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Full-Text Articles in Comparative Literature

Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska Jun 2026

Regarding World(S): A Review Of Elisha Cohn’S Milieu: A Creaturely Theory Of The Contemporary Novel (2025) And Daniel Wright’S The Grounds Of The Novel (2024), Katarzyna Bartoszyńska

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


World Literature According To Its Poster Children, Jernej Habjan Jun 2026

World Literature According To Its Poster Children, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Some of the most influential pronouncements on world literature have been made by the kind of authors who are most likely to emerge as representatives of world literature once we agree on a definition, including Goethe, the young Marx, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and the distinguished signatories of the manifesto for a world-literature in French. Breaking out of this vicious circle by referring to the authority of pure theorists of world literature is not the solution, as this would only pull us into a new vicious circle where most of these theorists would mostly remind us of the names that …


A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature, Trevor Jackson Jun 2026

A Crisis For Utopia: Jameson, The Collective, And The Future Of World Literature, Trevor Jackson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Working with Fredric Jameson’s influential discussions of utopia and world literature, the essay suggests that the prospect of utopia is frightening and also possibly boring insofar as it threatens to drain away the already waning possibility of experience in a postmodern, globalized world. In this world, resentment of the present seems to go hand in hand with a nostalgia for a fictitious past, underscoring the difficulty of conceptualizing new social, cultural, and economic arrangements. Viewing world literature as a possible source of a new utopian thought, a utopia unlimited to its contemporary dystopian guises, the essay retraces Jameson’s pronouncements on …


Milan Kundera As A Representative And A Theorist Of World Literature, Lucija Mandić Jun 2026

Milan Kundera As A Representative And A Theorist Of World Literature, Lucija Mandić

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article traces the evolution of Milan Kundera’s notion of world literature across his career, contextualizing his writings within major historical events, including the so-called liberalization of Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, the post-1989 transition of the former Soviet bloc, and the turn of the millennium. Throughout the years, but particularly after his own immigration to France in 1975, Kundera consistently tied the notion of world literature with that of Central Europe to emerge with a conceptual framework that enabled him to position (semi-)peripheral European literatures within the Western canon. In his influential 2005 essay “Die Weltliteratur,” Kundera ultimately reframed the …


Against Pleonexia: Auerbach, World Literature, And The End Of History, Simon During Jun 2026

Against Pleonexia: Auerbach, World Literature, And The End Of History, Simon During

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Erich Auerbach’s essay on world literature, written in the early postwar period, has become central to our understanding of the field. This essay contextualizes Auerbach on world literature by approaching it through his larger project, which it thinks about in relation to scholars rarely considered in this context. These scholars are the French literary historians and critics Hippolyte Taine and Remy de Gourmont, and the German historical sociologist Alexander Rüstow. To place Auerbach at an intersection of these very different figures turns out to be illuminating. It both enlarges our sense of him and helps us better understand why he …


Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan Jun 2026

Small Nations, Big Debates: Empowering The Slovenes As A Subject Of World History In The Critical 1930s, Marko Juvan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The article looks at how Slovene intellectuals and writers in the 1930s attempted to redefine the role of a small nation within the world-system in the face of global economic crisis, authoritarianism, imperialism, and the threat of fascist expansion. Three central interventions are examined in detail: firstly, Josip Vidmar’s culturalist defense of Slovenia as a nation defined by its intellectual and artistic achievements, which is contrasted with Edvard Kardelj’s Marxist reinterpretation of the Slovene national question as part of a broader anti-imperialist struggle; secondly, Anton Ocvirk’s peripheral model of comparative literary history, which emphasizes the creative contribution of small literatures …


The Proletarian Moment In World Literature, Anna Björk Einarsdóttir Jun 2026

The Proletarian Moment In World Literature, Anna Björk Einarsdóttir

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

During the interwar period (1918–1939), an international literary movement emerged in relation to internationalist and socialist politics and political struggles. Writers around the world saw themselves as contributors to a new proletarian moment within the historical unfolding of world literature. This movement was international, and writers situated on the peripheries of both the capitalist core and the emerging socialist world looked toward revolutionary Russia and other centers of the socialist world. This paper focuses on three such authors, the American Richard Wright, the Argentinian Roberto Arlt, and the Icelander Halldór Laxness. During the interwar period, all three were involved in …


Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan Jun 2026

Zheng Zhenduo And The Problem Of Priority In World Literature, Daniel M. Dooghan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This essay investigates how Zheng Zhenduo (郑振铎 1898–1958) developed a theory of world literature in response to threats to China both politically from without and culturally from within. Centered on an analysis of his 1922 article “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀), the essay argues that although Zheng believed like many of his contemporaries in the transformative effects of reading world literature in translation, that does not constitute the entirety of his theorization of world literature. Instead, he accepted the first-move advantage of other national literatures in defining both world literary standards and literature …


Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era, Wenxin Liang Jun 2026

Beyond The Great Wall: Zheng Zhenduo’S “Unification” Of World Literature At The Juncture Of China’S May Fourth And Post-World War I Era, Wenxin Liang

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

This article examines Chinese literary scholar Zheng Zhenduo’s 1922 essay “A View on the Unification of Literature” (Wenxue de tongyiguan 文學的統一觀) as a counter-narrative to both imperial isolationism and post-World War I nationalist fragmentation. Writing at the intersection of China’s May Fourth Movement and the global post-war crisis, Zheng developed a theory of world literature that challenged both Goethean Eurocentrism and the compartmentalization of comparative literary studies. Through systematic analysis of Zheng’s theoretical writings, editorial projects, and pioneering work on folk literature (suwenxue 俗文學), this article demonstrates that Zheng’s project of “the unification of literature” operated on three …


An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin Jun 2026

An Arc Stretched Between East And West: World (Or Universal?) Literature In Maxim Gorky’S Publishing Utopias, Francesca Lazzarin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

The Vsemirnaia Literatura publishing house was founded in Petrograd by Maxim Gorky less than a year after the October Revolution. Aligned with the objectives of the new regime, its mission was to translate and publish a substantial body of European and Asian poetry and prose, thereby contributing to the broad cultural education of the emerging Soviet generations. These ambitions clearly reflect a key element of Gorky’s conception of culture as well: for Gorky, culture in its broadest sense (encompassing literature, art, music, and science) had the potential to unite humanity under the ideals of peace and harmony. Within this new …


A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours, Salmoli Choudhuri Jun 2026

A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours, Salmoli Choudhuri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore delivered a lecture on world literature to an audience in Calcutta, the then capital of British India. Amid powerful and intersecting forces—colonialism and nationalism, industrial modernity and mass poverty—Tagore’s position on literature was neither disengaged nor defensive, insofar as he related it to the human condition and the capacity for world-making. Far from staking a representational claim to world literature on behalf of Indian or Bengali literature, I argue in this article, Tagore reconceptualized the idea from its earlier canonical formulation by Goethe. He departed from dominant nineteenth-century philosophies that conceived the world as a spatial—and …


Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng Jun 2026

Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …


World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again), Sándor Hites Jun 2026

World Literature: From Perpetual War To Perpetual Peace (And Back Again), Sándor Hites

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In this article, I address the relationship between world literature theories and questions of peace and war. I argue that the genesis of the concept of world literature in the 1790s was informed by profound transformations, in political theory, of the issue of the relevance and meaning of war and peace and their public perception. Theorists such as Wieland, Novalis, Jean Paul, and Fichte offered their concepts in response to the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, adjusting them to shifting frontlines and the change of military fortune. Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur already reflected on the geopolitics of the post-Napoleonic age, …


Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis, Jernej Habjan Jun 2026

Introduction: World Literature As World Crisis, Jernej Habjan

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Book Review: Yamin Hu, The Contemporary Construction Of The Chinese Form Of Marxist Literary Criticism , Paul R. Patton Jun 2026

Book Review: Yamin Hu, The Contemporary Construction Of The Chinese Form Of Marxist Literary Criticism , Paul R. Patton

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.


Worldbuilding, Brent Ryan Bellamy Jun 2026

Worldbuilding, Brent Ryan Bellamy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Substantialism, David Janzen Jun 2026

Substantialism, David Janzen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Style, Clint Burnham Jun 2026

Style, Clint Burnham

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Spectrality, Marlon Lieber Jun 2026

Spectrality, Marlon Lieber

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Secularization, Jake Orbison Jun 2026

Secularization, Jake Orbison

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Rhetoric, Fintan Calpin Jun 2026

Rhetoric, Fintan Calpin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Representation, Douglas Spielman Jun 2026

Representation, Douglas Spielman

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Real, Colleen Lye, Rumur Dowling Jun 2026

Real, Colleen Lye, Rumur Dowling

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Praxis, Tobias Dias Jun 2026

Praxis, Tobias Dias

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Nature, Christina Chalmers Jun 2026

Nature, Christina Chalmers

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Metonymy, Rob Jackson Jun 2026

Metonymy, Rob Jackson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Metabolism, Christian P. Haines Jun 2026

Metabolism, Christian P. Haines

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Mediation, Josh Robinson Jun 2026

Mediation, Josh Robinson

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Language, Richard Godden Jun 2026

Language, Richard Godden

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'


Labor, Thomas Waller Jun 2026

Labor, Thomas Waller

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Entry for special issue, 'Keywords for Value and Culture'