Articles in this volume focus on theories and histories of comparative literature and the 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 literature; Jan Walsh Hokenson on the culture of the context; Marko Juvan on literariness; Karl S.Y. Kao on metaphor; Kristof Jacek Kozak on comparative literature in Slovenia; Manuela Mourao on comparative literature in the USA; Jola Skulj on cultural identity; Slobodan Sucur on period styles and theory; Peter Swirski on popular and highbrow literature; Antony Tatlow on textual anthropology; William H. Thornton on East/West power politics in cultural studies; Steven Totosy on comparative cultural studies; and Xiaoyi Zhou and Q.S. Tong on comparative literature in China. The papers are followed by an index and a bibliography of scholarship in comparative literature and cultural studies compiled by Steven Totosy, Steven Aoun, and Wendy C. Nielsen.

The onslaught of literary theory in the post-modernist world of letters has left no institution of learning untouched. But Comparative Literature has had a paradoxical role in this firestorm of new ideas and radical challenges to established modes of study. On the one hand it was in North American centers and departments of Comparative Literature that Russian theoreticians like Lotman and Bakhtin, Czech scholars like Mukarovsky and Dolezel, the Konstanz theoreticians Iser and Jauss and the long list of French critics Barthes, Todorov, Kristeva, Genette and the master semiotician Greimas as well as such intellectual leaders as Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and Ricoeur found an enthusiastic North American following. On the other hand the international established circle of scholars who considered themselves to be the founders of a new more rigorous comparative mode of study were almost overnight upstaged by the radical scepticism that challenged and questioned, above all questioned the very foundations of literary scholarship. This volume is not an attempt at either compromise or surrender by either side. Our aim has been to bring together a representative selection from both sides in reasoned dialogue so that the participants and all who work in Comparative Literature will be more informed about the other side and have a clearer perception of their basis for disagreement and possible agreement. It is only through debates of this nature that the discipline will come of age and develop a coherent theory on its aims and methods.