Project MUSE®: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 41 (2014) through current issueLatest Articles: Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature ComparéeTWOProject MUSE®Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée1913-96590319-051XLatest articles in Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée. Feed provided by Project MUSE®“Are You African or Asian?”: Lies, Race, and Orientalism in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987539
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First published in Arabic in 1963, Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North was translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davis and published in the Heinemann African Writers series in 1969. The novel continues to generate a large amount of scholarly interest from a broad range of disciplines,1 and also became a staple of syllabi in courses across several universities. This extends outside of literature departments, as Season of Migration to the North has been included in curricula of religious studies, women’s studies, and history.2 One possible reason for this wide appeal, and the novel’s pedagogical versatility, is that it is just as readily categorized as Arab as it is categorized as African. The
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmall“Are You African or Asian?”: Lies, Race, and Orientalism in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North2026-04-09text/htmlen-US“Are You African or Asian?”: Lies, Race, and Orientalism in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®792662026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09The City as Playground: Detection, Crime, and Urban Space in J.B. Djian’s and Olivier Legrand’s The Baker Street Four Graphic Novel Series
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987540
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In “The Simple Art of Murder,” Raymond Chandler famously praised Dashiell Hammett for reinventing the genre of detective fiction, describing how he “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley” (14). In his stories featuring the Continental Op, Hammett gives readers insight into a world rife with crime, corruption, and moral decay, painting a gritty, urban landscape that sets the cynical tone and mood characteristic of hardboiled detective stories. By contrast, the world depicted in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes often conjures a romanticized image of Victorian London through the role of the Great Detective, who shines like a beacon of hope in a city shrouded in a “drizzly fog” and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmallThe City as Playground: Detection, Crime, and Urban Space in J.B. Djian’s and Olivier Legrand’s The Baker Street Four Graphic Novel Series2026-04-09text/htmlen-USThe City as Playground: Detection, Crime, and Urban Space in J.B. Djian’s and Olivier Legrand’s The Baker Street Four Graphic Novel Series2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®854112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09A Sigh of History: Reading Ha Jin’s War Trash
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987541
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Two decades have passed since the publication of War Trash in 2004. During this period, Ha Jin has further consolidated his prominent position in the history of both Asian American literature and world literature through his prolific output, which includes six novels, a short story collection, a book of poetry, a work of non-fiction, and a collection of essays on literature, exile, and writing in a second language. Notably, however, despite the success of War Trash, which earned him a second PEN/Faulkner Award and a Pulitzer Prize nomination, his subsequent books have not garnered any comparable major accolades. Nevertheless, this phenomenon has not diminished scholarly interest in his works and his philosophy of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmallA Sigh of History: Reading Ha Jin’s War Trash2026-04-09text/htmlen-USA Sigh of History: Reading Ha Jin’s War Trash2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®818372026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09“Garments Shed by Ghosts”: Magical Realism and Trauma in Short Stories of Displacement
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987542
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The real and the supernatural coexist within the physical world in Pulitzer Prizewinning author Viet Thanh Nguyen’s short story “Black-Eyed Women” (2017). The unnamed narrator of Nguyen’s short story is a thirty-eight-year-old woman who is repeatedly visited by the corporeal ghost of her brother, who was murdered years prior aboard the boat in which she and her family fled Vietnam. The ghost arrives drenched—the magical logic being that since he was buried at sea, he has had to swim to reach land—and his clothing reeks of brine and of the boat itself. The narrator gives the ghost a set of her own clothes but when she turns her back on him the ghost disappears, leaving his garments behind: “The black shorts and gray
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmall“Garments Shed by Ghosts”: Magical Realism and Trauma in Short Stories of Displacement2026-04-09text/htmlen-US“Garments Shed by Ghosts”: Magical Realism and Trauma in Short Stories of Displacement2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®844852026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09The Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms by Xiaofei Tian (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987543
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No other period, especially one so brief, has quite captured Chinese romantic imagination as the Three Kingdoms (220–280), and this claim can also be made to a great degree for Japan, Korea, and Vietnam. These dates mark the formal parameters of the period in history, that is, after the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220, but the Three Kingdoms era actually begins a quarter century earlier, at the outset in 196 of substantially the last reign period, Jian’an, of the last Han emperor, Emperor Xian, who abdicated to the ruler of Wei, one of the Three Kingdoms, in 220. Reign titles like Jian’an were intended to be auspicious; this one can be translated as Established Peace. The reality, however, is sadly ironic. This was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmallThe Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms by Xiaofei Tian (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USThe Halberd at Red Cliff: Jian’an and the Three Kingdoms by Xiaofei Tian (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®238112026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Islamophobia and the Novel by Peter Morey (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987544
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Peter Morey’s Islamophobia and the Novel is an ambitious, engaging, and timely work of criticism that explores how the novel–as form, cultural indicator, and genre–engages the structures of feeling that organize the mode of bigotry that goes by the name of Islamophobia. Despite the wide-reaching provocation of its title, Morey’s book focuses primarily on realist novels written in English and published since 2001. The book smartly progresses from the blunter expressions of Islamophobia in a writer such as Martin Amis to more nuanced, subtle, and self-aware deployments and contestations of the tropes and modalities that constitute Islamophobic discourse. An important feature of the method and structure of the text is
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmallIslamophobia and the Novel by Peter Morey (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USIslamophobia and the Novel by Peter Morey (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®100872026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987545
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Comparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age, by David Damrosch, is an illuminating and meticulously researched study of comparative literature in a global era. In 2003, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak declared the death of traditional comparative literature as a discipline and called for a new comparative literature in her marvellous book The Death of a Discipline, while Damrosch asserts that “from Herder and de Staël to Auerbach and beyond, the perturbed souls we have examined in this book can help us chart our course forward as we seek new and better ways to compare the literatures today” (347). In a sense, Damrosch resonates optimistically with Spivak and beyond in response to the academic status of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmallComparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USComparing the Literatures: Literary Studies in a Global Age by David Damrosch (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®121842026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09World Literature in an Age of Geopolitics by Theo D’haen (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/987546
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Theo D’haen’s collection of essays ranges widely and impressively over literary theory, American fiction, and Dutch poetry, with diversions to consider Caribbean writers in exile, Brussels as a node in the circulation of literature, and the changing position of Chinese in the Western literary imagination, and cites texts in Dutch, French, and German. One definition of World Literature might very well be the range of texts capable of being brought under discussion by Theo D’haen.Another definition might be an elusive object conjured up but never finally pinned down by the name “World Literature.” World Literature, like Comparative Literature, is an academic field obsessed with asking itself what it is. It is forever
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/638/image/coversmallWorld Literature in an Age of Geopolitics by Theo D’haen (review)2026-04-09text/htmlen-USWorld Literature in an Age of Geopolitics by Theo D’haen (review)2026-04-092026TWOProject MUSE®110532026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002026-04-09