A Companion to Comparative Literature

A Companion to Comparative Literature presents a collection of more than thirty original essays from established and emerging scholars, which explore the history, current state, and future of comparative literature.

• Features over thirty original essays from leading international contributors
• Provides a critical assessment of the status of literary and cross-cultural inquiry
• Addresses the history, current state, and future of comparative literature
• Chapters address such topics as the relationship between translation and transnationalism, literary theory and emerging media, the future of national literatures in an era of globalization, gender and cultural formation across time, East-West cultural encounters, postcolonial and diaspora studies, and other experimental approaches to literature and culture

Ali Behdad is John Charles Hillis Professor of Comparative Literature and Chair of English Department at UCLA. He is the author of Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (1995) and A Forgetful Nation: On Immigration and Cultural Identity in the United States (2005).

Dominic Thomas is Chair of the Departments of French and Francophone Studies and Italian at the University of California Los Angeles, where he is also Professor of Comparative Literature. He has edited several volumes on literary topics and is the author of Nation-Building, Propaganda and Literature in Francophone Africa (2002) and Black France: Colonialism, Immigration and Transnationalism (2007).