Editor's Note

This second issue of 2007 assembles eight essays from the BCLA 'Literature Travels' workshop conference held at the University of Wolverhampton in September 2005, accompanied by the editors' introduction and an afterword, and complemented by three book reviews. Forthcoming themed issues will be devoted to 'The Novelization of Islamic Literatures' (Vol. 4.3), 'Listening to Sing' – on music and literature (Vol. 5.1), 'Folly' (Vol. 5.2–3, a double-issue that assembles the keynote speeches and select papers from this year's triennial BCLA conference), 'Gender' (Vol. 6.2) and 'Cinematicity' (Vol. 6.3).

Volume 6.1 in early 2009 will be devoted to the publication of articles received and reviewed via the open submission peer-evaluation process. I would like to take this opportunity to invite all colleagues – in which I include PhD students and other newcomers to the field – to submit their work to me as editor of Comparative Critical Studies for peer review and, ultimately, publication; as in 2009, the first issue of most years will typically contain a cluster of such articles sent to us as part of our open submission process.

It is with great sadness that I report further losses to the community of comparatists worldwide, following the death of Malcolm Bowie and Wolfgang Iser also this year. On January 27, 2007, the Spanish comparatist Claudio Guillén died in Madrid at the age of 82. His works, notably Literature as System. Essays Toward the Theory of Literary History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971) and The Challenge of Comparative Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), remain an inspiration to us all and a lasting reminder of what Comparative Literature is about. And on June 8, 2007, Richard Rorty died at his home in Palo Alto, California, at the age of 75; perhaps best remembered for his seminal works Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty had over time become disillusioned with the narrowness of Philosophy as practised, moving instead into a Humanities career at the University of Virginia in 1982 and joining the Department of Comparative Literature at Stanford in 1998.

Finally, as a footnote to the publication of Catrin Barnsteiner's short story 'Extinguished' in the Dryden Translation Competition section of the last issue (CCS 4.1, 2007, pp. 157–164) I would like to add that the story's original German title is 'Verglüht'; it was published as the title story of Barnsteiner's 2004 volume Verglüht, the copyright of which is held by the SchirmerGraf Verlag in Munich.