Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization

Focuses on the influence of multiculturalism as a concept transforming literary and cultural studies. This book offers a comprehensive survey of comparative criticism in the 1990s. It demonstrates that comparative critical strategies can provide insights into the world’s changing, and increasingly colliding, cultures.
As an academic discipline built upon Enlightenment thought and a cosmopolitan worldview-not grounded in the literary tradition of any single language or nation-comparative literature has benefited from regular reexamination of its basic principles and practices. The American Comparative Literature Association 1993 report on the state of the discipline, prepared under the leadership of Charles Bernheimer, focused on the influence of multiculturalism as a concept transforming literary and cultural studies. That report and the vigorous responses it generated, published together as Comparative Literature in the Age of Multicultura