Comparative Literature

Important works for Comparative Literature:

A partial list of important secondary sources in the field of comparative literature, dealing with “comparison” proper between different genres, cultures, languages, histories, and geographies, as well as topic specific comparisons among forms, politics, genders, imperial and colonial pasts/presents, and other important representational and performative practices. Below that is a list related to "world literature" and its growing importance as a contrast to comparative literature.

 

Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel (1920) & History and Class Consciousness (1923)

 

Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946)

 

Leo Spitzer, Linguistics and Literary History: Essays in Stylistics (1948)

 

René Wellek and Austin Warren, Theory of Literature (1949)

 

Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Structural Study of Myth (1955)

 

Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (1955)

 

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1957)

 

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (1960)

 

Roman Jakobson, Linguistics and Poetics (1960)

 

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)

 

René Etiemble, Comparaison n'est pas raison (1963)

 

Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967)

 

Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970), Mythologies (

 

Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method (1972)

 

Harry Levin, Grounds for Comparison (1972)

 

Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (1973)

 

Hélène Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

 

Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own (1977)

 

Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), Culture and Imperialism (1993)

 

Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language (1980)

 

Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (1929), Rabelais and His World (1965), The Dialogic Imagination (1981)

 

Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics (1985)

 

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985)

 

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)


Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990)

 

Claudio Guillén, The Challenge of Comparative Literature (1993)

 

Susan Bassnett, Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction (1993)

 

Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994)

 

Emily Apter, The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006)

 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (2003)

 

Important works for World Literature:

Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992)

 

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Politics of Translation (1993)

 

Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility (1995)

 

Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters (1999)

 

Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (2000)

 

David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (2003)

 

Franco Moretti (Ed.), The Novel: History, Geography, and Culture (2006)

 

Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (2006)

 

David Damrosch, How to Read World Literature (2009)

 

Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (2013), Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History (2005)

 

Theo D’haen, David Damrosch, and Djelal Kadir (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011)

 

Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (2013)

 

Katherine Biers, Virtual Modernism: Writing and Technology in the Progressive Era (2013)

 

Rey Chow, Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial Experience (2014)

 

Aamir Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016)

 

Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, Civilization (2017)