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324 books match the query 'Comparative literature' and 10 start with l

cover of Late Colonial Sublime: Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism

Late Colonial Sublime

Neo-Epics and the End of Romanticism

G. S. Sahota

Northwestern University Press, 2018

Taking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime reconstellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism and postcolonial critique, this book forges an innovative approach to the question of late romanticism and grounds categories such as the sublime within the dynamic of commodification. While G. S. Sahota takes canonical European critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the outskirts of empire, he reads Indian writers such as Muhammad Iqbal and Jayashankar Prasad in light of the expansion of instrumental rationality and the neotraditional critiques of the West it spurred at the onset of decolonization.

By bringing together distinct literary canons—both metropolitan and colonial, hegemonic and subaltern, Western and Eastern, all of which took shape upon the common realities of imperial capitalism—Late Colonial Sublime takes an original dialectical approach. It experiments with fragments, parallaxes, and constellational form to explore the aporias of modernity as well as the possible futures they may signal in our midst. A bold intervention into contemporary debates that synthesizes a wealth of sources, this book will interest readers and scholars in world literature, critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and South Asian studies.
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cover of Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces

Latin American Literature at the Millennium

Local Lives, Global Spaces

Cecily Raynor

Bucknell University Press, 2021

Latin American Literature at the Millennium: Local Lives, Global Spaces analyzes literary constructions of locality from the early 1990s to the mid 2010s. In this astute study, Raynor reads work by Roberto Bolaño, Valeria Luiselli, Luiz Ruffato, Bernardo Carvalho, João Gilberto Noll, and Wilson Bueno to reveal representations of the human experience that unsettle conventionally understood links between locality and geographical place. The book raises vital considerations for understanding the region’s transition into the twenty-first century, and for evaluating Latin American authors’ representations of everyday place and modes of belonging.
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cover of LatinAsian Cartographies: History, Writing, and the National Imaginary

LatinAsian Cartographies

History, Writing, and the National Imaginary

Thananopavarn, Susan

Rutgers University Press, 2018

LatinAsian Cartographies examines how Latina/o and Asian American writers provide important counter-narratives to the stories of racial encroachment that have come to characterize twenty-first century dominant discourses on race. Susan Thananopavarn contends that the Asian American and Latina/o presence in the United States, although often considered marginal in discourses of American history and nationhood, is in fact crucial to understanding how national identity has been constructed historically and continues to be constructed in the present day. 

Thananopavarn creates a new “LatinAsian” view of the United States that emphasizes previously suppressed aspects of national history, including imperialism, domestic racism during World War II, Cold War operations in Latin America and Asia, and the politics of borders in an age of globalization. LatinAsian Cartographies ultimately reimagines national narratives in a way that transforms dominant ideas of what it means to be American.   
 
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cover of Legacies of the Stone Guest: The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature

Legacies of the Stone Guest

The Don Juan Legend in Russian Literature

Alexander Burry

University of Wisconsin Press, 2023

The story of Don Juan first appeared in writing in seventeenth-century Spain, reaching Russia about a century later. Its real impact, however, was delayed until Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin, put his own, unique, and uniquely inspirational, spin on the tale. Published in 1830, TheStone Guest is now recognized, with other Pushkin masterpieces, as part of the Russian literary canon. Alexander Burry traces the influence of Pushkin’s brilliant innovations to the legend, which he shows have proven repeatedly fruitful through successive ages of Russian literature, from the Realist to the Silver Age, Soviet, and contemporary periods. Burry shows that, rather than creating a simple retelling of an originally religious tale about a sinful, consummate seducer, Pushkin offered open-ended scenes, re-envisioned and complicated characters, and new motifs that became recursive and productive parts of Russian literature, in ways that even Pushkin himself could never have predicted.

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cover of Litcomix: Literary Theory and the Graphic Novel

Litcomix

Literary Theory and the Graphic Novel

Adam Geczy

Rutgers University Press, 2023

Critical studies of the graphic novel have often employed methodologies taken from film theory and art criticism. Yet, as graphic novels from Maus to Watchmen have entered the literary canon, perhaps the time has come to develop theories for interpreting and evaluating graphic novels that are drawn from classic models of literary theory and criticism. 
 
Using the methodology of Georg Lukács and his detailed defense of literary realism as a socially embedded practice, Litcomix tackles difficult questions about reading graphic novels as literature. What critical standards should we use to measure the quality of a graphic novel? How does the genre contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the world? What qualities distinguish it from other forms of literature? 
 
LitComix hones its theoretical approach through case studies taken from across the diverse world of comics, from Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s groundbreaking manga to the Hernandez Brothers’ influential alt-comix. Whether looking at graphic novel adaptations of Proust or considering how Jack Kirby’s use of intertextuality makes him the Balzac of comics, this study offers fresh perspectives on how we might appreciate graphic novels as literature. 
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cover of Literary Translation in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century: Bridging Experiences, Theories and Cultures

Literary Translation in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century

Bridging Experiences, Theories and Cultures

Edited by Dirce Waltrick do Amarante and Letícia Maria Vieira de Souza Goellner

University College London, 2026

Encompassing hegemonic, nonhegemonic, and pidgin languages, this compilation explores the state of literary translation studies in Latin America. 

Literary Translation in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century provides an in-depth exploration of the current landscape of literary translation studies and translation practices across Latin America. The unparalleled linguistic diversity of Latin America, with nearly five hundred languages spoken, makes translation a vital aspect of daily life. This volume aims to contribute to the analysis from a Latin American perspective, presenting a fresh reading of translation theories that originate in Latin America, as well as theoretical reflections and practical examples of literary translation by poets and artists situated in the continent. 

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cover of Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress

Literatures of Liberation

Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress

Mukti Lakhi Mangharam

The Ohio State University Press, 2017

The postcolonial spread of democratic ideals such as freedom and equality has taken place all over the world despite the widespread cultural differences that would seem to inhibit such change. In her new book, Literatures of Liberation: Non-European Universalisms and Democratic Progress, Mukti Lakhi Mangharam questions how these “universalisms” came to be and suggests that these elements were not solely the result of Europe-based Enlightenment ideals. Instead, they also arose in context-specific forms throughout the world (particularly in the Global South), relatively independently from Enlightenment concepts. These translatable yet distinct cognitive frameworks, or “contextual universalisms,” as she argues, were central to the spread of modern democratic principles in response to the relentless expansion of capital.
  
In this way, she posits that these universalisms reconceptualize democratic ideals not as Western imports into precolonial societies but as regional phenomena tied to local relations of power and resistance. In charting these alternative democratic trajectories, Mangharam examines oft-overlooked regional and vernacular literary forms and provides a fresh approach to current theorizations of postcolonial and world literatures.
 
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cover of Living On After Failure: Affective Structures of Modern Life

Living On After Failure

Affective Structures of Modern Life

Irving Goh

Duke University Press, 2025

In Living On After Failure, Irving Goh dwells with failure and all of its negative affects. Goh does not seek a theorization of failure as something to overcome or turn into a recuperative philosophy or progress narrative. Rather, he engages with the ontological condition of failure as a process of staying with the impasse that failure brings. Drawing on the thought of Berlant, Derrida, Foucault, and Nancy, Goh examines works by contemporary writers like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rachel Cusk, Édouard Levé, Yiyun Li, and Kate Zambreno. He guides readers through stages of reckoning with failure as an immersive impasse: flopping, drifting itself, a dark care of the self, melodrama, and postscripting. By unsettling the failure/success binary, Goh provides those who cannot shake off their sense of failure, or who refuse the narratives of progress or success and their ideologies of grit and resilience, with discursive and affective spaces in which to attend to their desire to be attached to their failures.
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cover of Loyal Subjects: Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Loyal Subjects

Bonds of Nation, Race, and Allegiance in Nineteenth-Century America

Duquette, Elizabeth

Rutgers University Press, 2010

When one nation becomes two, or when two nations become one, what does national affiliation mean or require? Elizabeth Duquette answers this question by demonstrating how loyalty was used during the U.S. Civil War to define proper allegiance to the Union. For Northerners during the war, and individuals throughout the nation after Appomattox, loyalty affected the construction of national identity, moral authority, and racial characteristics.

Loyal Subjects considers how the Civil War complicated the cultural value of emotion, especially the ideal of sympathy. Through an analysis of literary works written during and after the conflict-from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Chiefly About War Matters" through Henry James's The Bostonians and Charles Chestnutt's "The Wife of His Youth," to the Pledge of Allegiance and W.E.B. Du Bois's John Brown, among many others-Duquette reveals that although American literary criticism has tended to dismiss the Civil War's impact, postwar literature was profoundly shaped by loyalty.
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cover of Lu Xun and World Literature

Lu Xun and World Literature

Edited by Xiaolu Ma and Carlos Rojas

Hong Kong University Press, 2025

Impressive and significant contributions to Lu Xun scholarship and world literature.

In Lu Xun and World Literature, the contributors examine various aspects of Lu Xun, who is known as the father of modern Chinese literature. Essays in this book focus on Lu Xun’s works in relation to the notions of world literature and processes of literary worlding. They offer detailed analyses of Lu Xun’s own literary oeuvre and of foreign works that engage with his writings. This volume also focuses on many facets of the publication and dissemination of Lu Xun’s works, from printing and binding to the discussions and debates that followed their release in China and abroad. This book not only makes an important contribution to the field of Lu Xun studies, but also proposes a reexamination of the category of world literature.
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