Introduction: Literary Texts and Contexts: Comparing the World and the World of Comparison

The contributors to this special issue demonstrate innovative ways to explore comparative literature and world literature, which we have examined under the rubric, "Literary Texts and Contexts: Comparing the World and the World of Comparison." This is not an issue seeking consensus, but one that brings scholars from different parts of the world to discuss the theory and practice of literature, its texts and contexts, from theory to film and television. National, comparative, world, and other designations for the study of literature all come into this debate. This issue, then, is a forum in which diversity and difference express themselves.

Translation has long been part of intellectual, cultural, and literary exchange in Europe and elsewhere. India and China developed literary culture early, so that there is no one centre, no one point of view in the study of culture and literature. The translation of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin from the scriptures was fundamental in Western Europe, and the translation of the holy writings of Buddhism was also vital in China. India, it might be said, influenced the Greeks, the Chinese, and others. India was more populous earlier than even China and certainly than Europe and the Americas. In mathematics and religion, the peoples of India had great influence elsewhere. As far as we know, the Indus valley and Sumeria were the earliest places with literacy (see Chan). So, in taking a historical view of the world after hunter-gatherers and the agricultural revolution, the story would not begin in Xi'an, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, London, Paris, New York, or the like. African cultures helped to mould Egypt, which helped to mould Greece. Peoples move, and with them goods, stories, and ideas.

If we take a long enough view, then the human is not yet born, at least in cosmological, geological, and biological time. Then we see the Neanderthals and early humans mating in what is present-day Israel, as well as similar groups from central Asia and Siberia with East Asians in the highest settlements in the Himalayas (see, for instance, Rincon and National Geographic). Culture, based on settlement of some fixity, is about twelve thousand years, not much in the scheme of things. In such a context, the pride of nations and cultures comes and goes and is a spring snow melting in the heat of the sun. Using the genre of travels, Jonathan Swift shifts point of view in various "worlds" to show the limitations of Gulliver and his pride as an Englishman and European (see Gulliver [Swift]). This ethnological irony turned back on one's own compatriots is something Tacitus used in Germania and Montaigne employed in his essay "Des Coches" (see Tacitus and Montaigne).

Perhaps in light of irony and satire against human pretension, including my own, I have proposed and still propose many literatures or a many-sided literature in the field of human culture, literatures or a literature, and the study of it or them, that is varied (see, for instance, Hart, Comparing Empires; "Futures of Comparative Literature"; Literature, Theory, History). The very variety is shown in the articles that make up this special issue. Individual, cultural, and political hubris often seem misguided and limited in the long run. It is the multiplicity of points of view here that should stimulate readers to consider questions of theory and practice, of how texts and contexts relate, and whether there is or is not an overlap between comparative literature and world literature, whether the authors compare the world in a world of comparison.

In setting out an order to these articles, my co-editors, Wu Shang and Kang Yaru, and I have placed the contributions in ways in which one essay speaks to its neighbours and builds towards a common, though diverse, end. The consideration of national, comparative, world, and other literatures is not something we tried to coordinate, and each author determined how he or she was going to engage the matter at hand. What the articles share is an engagement with theory and practice and a focus on texts, images, and contexts that contribute to...