Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledges for Preserving Cultural Diversity theme is a component of Encyclopedia of Social Sciences and Humanities in the global Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS), which is an integrated compendium of twenty one Encyclopedias. The Theme on Comparative Literature: Sharing Knowledge's for Preserving Cultural Diversity provides six different topics: 1. Language, literature and human sustainability; 2. Relationships among literature and other artistic activities and discourses ; 3. Comparative literature and other fields of knowledge; 4. Comparative literature, criticism and media ; 5. Comparative literature in the age of global change; 6. Translatio studii and cross-cultural movements or Weltverkehr. These three volumes are aimed at a wide spectrum of audiences: University and College Students, Educators and Research Personnel.

The present volume meets a frequently expressed demand as it is the first collection of all the relevant essays and articles which Steven Paul Scher has written on Literature and Music over a period of almost forty years in the field of Word and Music Studies. Scher, The Daniel Webster Professor of German and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH, USA, is one of the founding fathers of Word and Music Studies and a leading authority in what is in the meantime a well-established intermedial field. He has published very widely in a variety of journals and collections of essays, which until now have not always been easy to lay one's hands on. His work covers a wide range of subjects and comprises theoretical, methodological and historical studies, which include discussions of Ferruccio Busoni, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Judith Weir, the Talking Heads and many others and which pay special attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann and German Romanticism. The range and depth of these studies have made him the 'mastermind' of Word and Music Studies who has defined the basic aims and objectives of the discipline. This volume is of interest to literary scholars and musicologists as well as comparatists and all those concerned about the rapidly expanding field of Intermedia Studies.

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, all of them revised but retaining the original argument. They form the core of those seminal writings which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, besides providing a by now widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity. The essays are presented chronologically under the headings of “Theory and Typology”, “Literature–Music Relations”, “Transmedial Narratology”, and “Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena” and cover a wide spectrum of topics of both historical and contemporary relevance, ranging from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Gulda through Sterne, Hardy, Woolf and Beckett to Jan Steen, Hogarth, Magritte and comics. The volume should be essential reading for scholars of literature, music and art history with an interdisciplinary orientation as well as general readers interested in the fascinating interaction of the arts.

Introducing Comparative Literature is a comprehensive guide to the field offering clear, concise information alongside useful analysis and examples. It frames the introduction within recent theoretical debates and shifts in the discipline whilst also addressing the history of the field and its practical application. Looking at Comparative Literature within the context of globalization, cosmopolitanism and post or transnationalism, the book also offers engagement and comparison with other visual media such as cinema and e-literature. The first four chapters address the broad theoretical issues within the field such as ‘interliterary theory’, decoloniality, and world literature, while the next four are more applied, looking at themes, translation, literary history and comparison with other arts. This engaging guide also contains a glossary of terms and concepts as well as a detailed guide to further reading.

The eighteen interdisciplinary essays in this volume were presented in 2001 in Sydney, Australia, at the Third International Conference on Word and Music Studies, which was sponsored by The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA). The conference celebrated the sixty-fifth birthday of Steven Paul Scher, arguably the central figure in word and music studies during the last thirty-five years. The first section of this volume comprises ten articles that discuss, or are methodologically based upon, Scher's many analyses of and critical commentaries on the field, particularly on interrelationships between words and music. The authors cover such topics as semiotics, intermediality, hermeneutics, the de-essentialization of the arts, and the works of a wide range of literary figures and composers that include Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Proust, T. S. Eliot, Goethe, Hölderlin, Mann, Britten, Schubert, Schumann, and Wagner. The second section consists of a second set of papers presented at the conference that are devoted to a different area of word and music studies: cultural identity and the musical stage. Eight scholars investigate - and often problematize - widespread assumptions regarding 'national' and 'cultural' music, language, plots, and production values in musical stage works. Topics include the National Socialists' construction of German national identity; reception-based examinations of cultural identity and various "national" opera styles; and the means by which composers, librettists, and lyricists have attempted to establish national or cultural identity through their stage works.

This volume is a pioneering study in the theory and history of the imitation of music in fiction and constitutes an important contribution to current intermediality research. Starting with a comparison of basic similarities and differences between literature and music, the study goes on to provide outlines of a general theory of intermediality and its fundamental forms, in which a more specialized theory of the musicalization of (narrative) literature based on contemporary narratology and a typology of the forms of musico-literary intermediality are embedded. It also addresses the question of how to recognize a musicalized fiction when reading one and why Sterne's Tristram Shandy, contrary to what has been previously said, is not to be regarded as a musicalized fiction. In its historical part, the study explores forms and functions of experiments with the musicalization of fiction in English literature. After a survey of the major preconditions for musicalization - the increasing appreciation of music in 18th and 19th-century aesthetics and its main causes - exemplary fictional texts from romanticism to postmodernism are analyzed. Authors interpreted are De Quincey, Joyce, Woolf, A. Huxley, Beckett, Burgess and Josipovici. Whilst the limitations of a transposition of music into fiction remain apparent, experiments in this field yield valuable insights into mainly a-mimetic and formalist aesthetic tendencies in the development of more recent fiction as a whole and also show to what extent traditional conceptions of music continue to influence the use of this medium in literature. The volume is of relevance for students and scholars of English, comparative and general literature as well as for readers who take an interest in intermediality or interart research.

This volume is dedicated to the musico-literary oeuvre of Walter Bernhart, professor of English literature at Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz/Austria and pioneer in the field of intermedial relations between literature and other arts and media. It renders accessible a wide variety of texts which are sometimes no longer easily retrievable. The 37 texts collected here in chronological order span the period from 1985 to 2013 and thematically range from contributions to opera programmes and the discussion of musical aspects of Romantic and modernist poetry to inquiries into individual operas and composers as well as into theoretical aspects of word and music relations (e. g. the ways of setting poetry to music, musico-literary ‘comparative poetics’, the concept of ‘genre’ in music and literature, iconicity in both media, their narrative as well as metareferential and illusionist capacities). The volume is of relevance to literary scholars and musicologists but also to all those with an interest in intermediality studies in general and in the relations between literature and music in particular.