The volume is the first annual of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, a thematic volume with selected papers from material published in the journal in volumes 1.1-4 of 1999 and 2.1-4 of 2000. The papers are with focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the emerging field of comparative cultural studies. Contributors are Kwaku Asante-Darko on African postcolonial literature, Hendrik Birus on Goethe's concept of world literature, Amiya Dev on comparative literature in India, Marian Galik on interliterariness, Ernst Grabovszki on globalization, new media, and world...

The history of exile literature is as old as the history of writing itself. Despite this vast and varied literary tradition, criticism of exile writing has tended to analyze these works according to a binary logic, where exile either produces creative freedom or it traps the writer in restrictive nostalgia. The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language and Space in Hispanic Literatures offers a theory of exile writing that accounts for the persistence of these dual impulses and for the ways that they often co-exist within the same literary works. Focusing on writers working in the latter...

In The New Woman in Early Twentieth-century Chinese Fiction, Jin Feng discusses representations of women in May Fourth fiction, issues of gender, modernity, individualism, subjectivity, and narrative strategy. In this thought-provoking book about a crucial period of Chinese literature, Feng argues that male writers such as Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Ba Jin, and Mao Dun created fictional women as mirror images of their own political inadequacy, but that at the same time this was also an egocentric ploy to affirm and highlight the modernity of the male author. This gender-biased attitude was translated...

This volume's genesis stems from the contributors' conviction that, given its vitality and excellence, Latin American literature deserves a more prominent place in comparative literature publications, curricula, and disciplinary discussions. The editors introduce the volume arguing, first, that there still exists, in some quarters, a lingering bias against literature written in Spanish and Portuguese and, second, that by embracing Latin American literature and culture more enthusiastically, comparative literature would find itself reinvigorated, placed into productive discourse with a host of...

The papers in this volume represent recent scholarship about Booker Prize Winner Michael Ondaatje's oeuvre by scholars working in English-Canadian literature and culture. Contributors to the volume are Victoria Cook, Marlene Goldman, and Sandeep Sanghera with papers on Anil's Ghost, Beverley Curran, Stephanie M. Hilger, Hsuan Hsu, and Steven Totosy on The English Patient, Glen Lowry and Winfried Siemerling on In the Skin of a Lion, Jon Saklofske on Coming Through Slaughter, and Eluned Summers-Bremner on Ondaatje's Poetry. The papers in the volume are followed by a selected bibliography of...

Fojas's book is a study about the aporia between cosmopolitanism as a sign of justice and cosmopolitanism as the consumption and display of international luxury items and cultural production. Turn of the century Pan-American cosmopolitanism described international aesthetic culture and fashion drawn from major world cities, but it was also implicitly political, it held a promise of justice in the acceptance and coexistence of difference. Being cosmopolitan was an orientation towards the cosmopolis in a search for models of tolerance and openness for different lifestyles, ways of being, and...

The volume fills a gap in scholarship about Imre Kertesz, whose work to date is largely unknown in the English-speaking world. The papers' authors are scholars from the US, Canada, the UK, Hungary, Germany, and New Zealand. In addition to the papers, the volume contains a bibliography of Kertesz's works including translations, and a bibliography of studies in several languages about his work.

Reisinger examines contemporary French society's relationship with violence in an era of increased media dominance. The study's innovative and interdisciplinary approach integrates media, cinema, and literary studies to analyze how crime news functions as a site of discursive struggle. By situating these crime stories in a larger historical and political context, she analyzes how media and politicians use the crime story as a tool for upholding the dominant ideology.

Philippe Codde provides a comparative cultural analysis of the unprecedented success of the Jewish novel in the postwar United States by situating the process and event in the context of three closely-related American cultural movements: the popularity in the US of French philosophical and literary existentialism, the increasing visibility of the Holocaust in US-American life, and the advent of radical theology. Codde argues that the literary repertoire of the postwar Jewish novel consists of an amalgam of these cultural elements that were making their mark in the political, religious, and...

Chabot Davis analyzes contemporary texts that bond together two seemingly antithetical sensibilities: the sentimental and the postmodern. Ranging across multiple media and offering a methodological union of textual analysis and reception study, Chabot Davis presents case studies of audience responses. Chabot Davis argues that sentimental postmodernism deepened leftist political engagement by moving audiences to identify emotionally with people across the divisions of gender, sexual identity, race, and ethnicity. This study questions the critical equation of postmodernism with apocalyptic...