Arcadia 2018; 53(2): 201–220

César Domínguez* and Birgit Neumann

Introduction: Delocalizing European
Literatures

https://doi.org/10.1515/arcadia-2018-0025

1
European language literatures have long ceased staying put in Europe and
conversely European literary cultures are increasingly shaped by non-European
literatures. While this geopolitical constellation is no recent phenomenon and can
be traced back to early modern forms of exchange, exploration, and conquest, the
beginning of the 21st century has witnessed a hitherto unprecedented acceleration
of processes of translocation and delocalization. Increasingly, the forces of globa-
lization and migration bear on literature within and beyond Europe, including
processes of production, distribution, and reception. The ever-faster travel of
literatures and cultures put pressure on the national paradigm as a conventiona-
lized frame for organizing comparative literary history, and the deterritorializa-
tion of European languages and literatures considerably complicates the very
category ‘European.’ Due to European colonialism and processes of migration,
many European languages have become global languages, shaping literary tradi-
tions across the globe and propelling the emergence of new diversified literary
traditions, which bind distinct local aesthetic practices into patterns of exchange.
In turn, the literary cultures of all European countries are increasingly shaped by
so-called minority or ethnic literatures, which often confront European literary
models with non-European traditions and radically undo the Herderian place-
language-people paradigm. Indeed, in our globalized modernity, an age of migra-
tion and digitalization, the monolingual paradigm that ties the unity of a nation
to the purity of a language has clearly lost its validity. As writers divide their time
between different places, claim belongingness to multiple cultures and speak
several languages, their writing can no longer be placed plausibly within a

*Corresponding author: César Domínguez, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Facultade

de Filoloxía, Burgo das Nacións s/nº, 15782 Santiago de Compostela (A Coruña), Spain,
email: cesar.dominguez@usc.es
Birgit Neumann, University of Düsseldorf, Department of English and American Studies, Chair of
Anglophone Literatures and Literary Translation, 40225 Düsseldorf, Germany,
email: birgit.Neumann@hhu.de

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202 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

national literary tradition, constructed with the aim of buttressing “fable[s] of

identity” (Greenblatt 58). The term delocalization marks the interest the special
issue takes in the trajectories, travels, and relocations of writers, cultures, lan-
guages, and books.1 Broadly speaking, we envision uses of delocalization in
literary studies – upon general meanings such as detachment from a particular
location, make something more global, and relocate in different contexts – in
connection to various historical developments such as imperialism, migration,
globalization, and related forms of cultural exchange and translation.
The special issue, which emerged from a conference organized by the Coordi-
nating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Lan-
guages (CHLEL) in 2017, takes the process of delocalization as a springboard for
questioning some of the basic premises of a comparative history of literatures in
European languages. Focusing on the interplay between the locations, deloca-
tions, and relocations of European literatures, the contributions situate the study
of comparative histories in relation to postcolonial studies, world literature, and
digital studies to explore the following questions: How do processes of globaliza-
tion change our understanding of European language literatures and how do they
affect the practice of comparative history? How, in turn, do European language
literatures invite us to adopt global perspectives on literary histories? Can we still
speak of European literatures and languages once they travel into other, non-
European contexts and are inevitably inflected by local appropriations and trans-
cultural exchange? Conversely, how do ‘non-European’ literatures and languages
with a strong and influential presence in Europe, such as Arabic, Hebrew, and
Turkish, challenge us to form new concepts of Europe? And last but not least:
How does digitalization contribute to the delocalization of literature and which
new opportunities do digital humanities offer to comparative literary history?
The analytical complexity and political urgency of these questions highlight
the need for new models of literary history and novel principles of comparison,
which can do justice to the traveling and migrating of literatures within and
across Europe (cf. Göttsche and Dunker). David Damrosch is certainly right in
noting that “[t]he waning of the hegemony of the national paradigm and the
opening out of a burgeoning global perspective [...] make this an auspicious time

1 According to the Historical Thesaurus of English, the first record of the word “delocalize” dates
back to 1855 with the meaning of ‘remove,’ ‘displace.’ As the Google Ngram Viewer shows, it is
from 1968 onwards that the usage trend of the word ‘delocalization’ grows exponentially within
the field of economics in relation to the process of “geographical relocation of production to
localities that possess a reservoir of cheap and adaptable supply of labour” (Labrianidis, Kalan-
taridis, and Dunford 148). As yet, there are no records of “delocalization” and “delocalized” in
literary studies lexica.

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 203

to contemplate the project of a history of world literature” (“History of World

Literature” 482). Comparative literary history has of course long-since been
shaped by an international thrust, which acknowledges the importance of ex-
change, exile, expatriatism, and displacement as major resources for literary
production in the West. And yet, this internationalism was frequently shaped by
Eurocentric premises and implicated in the logic of Western colonialism and
Euro-American hegemony, positing the West as a unique or at least privileged site
of creative invention (cf. Friedman 500). The adoption of a truly global perspec-
tive, by contrast, carries the promise to see European language literatures as part
of a world literary system in which multidirectional flows of ideas, traditions,
capital, commodities, and people pervasively question literary, political, and
epistemological boundaries and make visible contact zones, trajectories, and
entangled (literary) histories. The tracing of processes of delocalization not only
exhibits how European literatures are lifted from their local contexts and circulate
across national borders, it also exposes the extent to which European literatures
have been shaped by non-European influences and the synergies of global
exchange. Moreover, the adoption of a global perspective in literary history works
against the presentism of many global approaches to literature and discloses the
longstanding impact that processes of delocalization and circulation have had on
literary cultures within and beyond Europe (cf. Damrosch, “History of World
Literature” 490). Whereas fifty years ago it might still have seemed plausible to
locate the rise of the 18th-century novel within the nation and national territories,
recent research takes up insights provided by global history and links the genre to
overseas exploration. Accordingly, it retells the emergence of the novel as a
genuinely transatlantic history that unites different lands and connects to mar-
itime adventure and oceanic circulation (cf. Cohen).
In the last fifteen years or so, a range of publications have devoted themselves
to developing models, theories, and methods of comparative literary history that
can capture the circulation and delocalization of literature across the globe. The
four-volume collection Literary History: Towards A Global Perspective (edited by
Stefan Helgesson, 2006), the special issue Literary History in the Global Age (New
Literary History, edited by Ralph Cohen 2008), The American Comparative Litera-
ture Association Report Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization (edited
by Haun Saussy, 2006), Charles W. Pollard’s transcultural examination of New
World Modernisms (2004), Darko Dolinar and Marko Juvan’s Writing Literary
History (2006), Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature
Across Deep Time (2008), and Rebecca L. Walkowitz’s recent study Born Trans-
lated – The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) are just some
examples that amply testify to the proliferation of new literary histories. In a
number of theoretically innovative publications, scholars such as Linda Hutcheon

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204 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

(Rethinking Literary History: A Dialogue on Theory, with Valdés) and Mario

J. Valdés (“Rethinking the History of Literary History”), Aamir Mufti (“Global
Comparatism”), Emily Apter (The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Litera-
ture), Susan Friedman, Djelal Kadir, Svend Erik Larsen, and Baidik Bhattacharya
have suggested new methods of comparison that seek to overcome the center-
periphery model that has long dominated comparative literary history. These new
approaches often intersect with studies in world literature, which trace the various
travels and translations of literary works across the globe (cf. Moretti; Casanova;
Damrosch, What is World Literature?).2 At the same time, these recent interven-
tions into comparative literary history also expand beyond world literary studies
into postcolonial and diaspora studies, book studies, gender studies, translational
studies, and digital humanities. Rather than simply sketching the ways in which
literary texts circulate across the globe and are made available for local reader-
ships by diverse literary institutions, they display the multiple ways in which
global circulation, delocalization, and exchange inscribe themselves into a text
(see, e. g., Ramazani; Berman; Helgesson, “How Writing Becomes (World) Litera-
 

ture”; Walkowitz; Neumann and Rippl). Circulation, Susan Friedman (505) points
out, affects art “before and during the creative process” – and not only after it.
Accordingly, a number of studies in comparative literature build upon notions of
traveling or entangled cultures to expose a genuinely transcultural poetics that
emerges from and is modeled through cultural exchange (cf. Pollard; Dimock,
Through Other Continents; Ramazani).
Despite at times marked differences in theory, method, and historical scope,
the new comparative literary histories share a number of concerns that are also
taken up and taken on in the essays assembled within this special issue. Firstly,
current research accentuates the productivity and transformative agency of circu-
lation, exchange, and delocalization. Circulation and delocalization neither pro-
pel processes of homogenization nor merely impose existing poetic forms on
other, seemingly marginal literary cultures. Rather, circulation entails processes
of change, i. e., a creative appropriation of established literary traditions accord-
 

ing to localized knowledges, sensibilities, and needs (cf. Damrosch, What is World
Literature? 24). Circulation and delocalization, therefore, more often than not
bring forth increasing variations of literary forms and not an aesthetically flat
“literary monoculture that travels through the world absorbing difference,” as

2 David Damrosch in What is World Literature famously defines world literature by its capacity to
circulate “out into a broader world beyond its linguistic and cultural point of origin” (6). Accord-
ingly, the study of world literature is dedicated to examining the discontinuous trajectories of
literary texts across the globe and to analyzing how traveling texts manifest in new cultural
contexts.

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 205

Apter phrases her concerns about the prominence of world literature (Against
World Literature 83). The traveling of the European Bildungsroman to various
locales in colonial and postcolonial Africa, for instance, has considerably affected
some of the genre’s basic narrative techniques and ideological premises. Most
importantly, it has given rise to techniques of characterization that radically
question bourgeois assumptions of a coherent, self-enclosed, and autonomous
self, defined by deep psychology and a singular consciousness. And contrary to
the assumptions of, e. g., Pascale Casanova’s strictly gated world republic of
 

letters, circulation not only impacts so-called marginal literary cultures but also
European literatures. Appropriations and “exappropriations” (Derrida 37) make
available new symbolic forms and compel us to read European literature through
different lenses. Circulation, Friedman succinctly notes, involves “polycentricity”
(511). To do justice to this kind of polycentricity, scholars stress the need for a
relational, contrapuntal, and multiperspectival approach to comparative literary
history (cf. Hutcheon and Valdés), which traces connections between literary
forms across cultures and time periods and illuminates multiple nodal points at
which different aesthetic practices have met and intermingle. Akin to James
Clifford’s comparative cultural studies, such an approach is “produced through
an itinerary, always marked by a ‘way in,’ a history of locations and a location of
histories” (31).
Secondly, though stressing that literary traditions emerge from circulation
and exchange, recent approaches to comparative literary histories acknowledge
the formative force of the local. Circulation and delocalization are never only
processes of detachment but entail processes of reattachment and relocalization
in new contexts. Local contexts and situated knowledge inevitably impact crea-
tive traditions. The writings by Derek Walcott, Orhan Pamuk, Gabriel García
Márquez, Karl Ove Knausgård, and Elena Ferrante are read around the globe. Not
least due to the translocations of their authors, they cannot be placed within a
single local context; and yet, these literary texts, for all their investment in
mobility and traveling, remain highly responsive to localized concerns (cf. Dam-
rosch, “History of World Literature” 492). Though almost obsessively revealing
entanglements between the Old World and the New World, Walcott’s work, for
instance, is deeply committed to finding creative forms that can give expression
to the particularities of the Caribbean and forge a sense of locality (cf. Neumann).
Equally, the production, distribution, and reception of global texts follow regio-
nal patterns, which is also to say that the notion of a “singular universal sphere of
readership” (Berman 69) can no longer claim validity. Readers in England will
engage differently with Walcott’s insistent renegotiation of the European canon
and Greek mythology than readers in Brazil; and it is well-known that Ferrante’s
Neapolitan novels first needed to be translated into English and celebrated in the

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206 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

US before they received more critical attention in Italy (cf. Falkoff). Global
literature’s paradoxical pull between circulation and situatedness, therefore,
compellingly shows that the local is not the opposite of the global. The local, as
Dimock remarks, “is not purely indigenous, but a ‘cradling’ of the global within
one particular site” (“Black English as Creole Tongue” 41). As the local and global
are entangled in mutually transformative patterns, the situatedness of literature
may change or even destabilize the very local contexts from which it emerges and
in which it is received.
Thirdly, recent approaches to global comparative literary history stress the
need for “new scales of literary history” (Walkowitz 44) and for novel methods of
comparison. How can a global literary history be written; which principles of
selection and comparison should be involved, and which functions should such a
history fulfill? And how is it possible to overcome Eurocentric principles of
comparison and transform it into a truly “global comparison”, i. e., a kind of
 

comparison that according to Aamir Mufti “is a determinate and concrete re-
sponse to the hierarchical systems that have dominated cultural life since the
colonial era” (“Global Comparatism” 477)? Scholars in the field have given a
range of different answers to these questions, which might be indicative of the
“indefinite task” that comparative literature “establishes for itself” (Saussy, “Ex-
quisite Cadavers” 8). It is clear that the development of a truly global literary
history requires international and interdisciplinary collaboration along with the
need to overcome the Eurocentric methodologies, concepts, and categories un-
derlying the making of literary history. To tackle the practical problem of a multi-
plicity of languages and literary traditions across the world, Franco Moretti, for
instance, taps the opportunities offered by the digitalization of literature to
propose a methodology of distant reading. Distant reading replaces close, sus-
tained readings of singular texts with an encompassing, broad-ranging approach.
Such a patchwork approach brings together local literary histories to reveal
literary patterns on an enlarged, global scale. According to Moretti, “[l]iterary
history will very quickly become very different from what it is now: it will become
‘second hand’: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct
textual reading.” (57, italics F. M.) It is precisely the distance from the text and
hence the neglect of its singularity that, according to Moretti, carries the promise
to move beyond the limitations of established canons, which rely on strict
mechanisms of selection reflecting geopolitical hierarchies. In a similar vein,
Damrosch, in his article “Toward a History of World Literature” (2008) stresses
the necessity to develop new modes of constructing global literary history. More
specifically, he advocates a Wikipedia model as a new mode of presentation that
“enable[s] [...] basic history to expand via hyperlinks into nested levels of greater
depth and specificity” (489). But importantly, Damrosch also proposes principles

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 207

of comparison that such a literary history could build upon. More specifically, he
suggests linking texts from seemingly unrelated literary cultures with the aim of
making visible hitherto unnoticed “interrelations and nonrelations” between
literary forms (“History of World Literature” 493). Abandoning principles of
genealogical connectivity and linear progress, the comparison of seemingly un-
related texts could, Damrosch holds, attune us to the varieties of possible aes-
thetic choices and “the varieties of relations possible within a single region”
(“History of World Literature” 493), thus also encouraging new modes of under-
standing local literatures.
Damrosch’s suggestion to link seemingly unrelated texts to one another ties
in with recent scholarship in comparative studies that draws attention to the
limits of comparability, commensurability, and translatability and underlines the
productive force of difference and incommensurability (cf., e. g., Melas; Friedman;
 

Apter, Against World Literature). Broadly speaking, these approaches proceed

from the assumption that the literatures of the world share, in the words of
Glissant, “similarities that are not to be standardized” (254). Comparison based
upon incommensurability, scholars such Radhakrishnan, Shu-mei Shih, Mufti
(“Global Comparatism”), and Melas maintain, offers a means of refuting Euro-
centric modes of comparison, which forcefully subject non-European and non-
Western literatures to the seemingly universal standards derived from a European
canon. Natalie Melas, to give just one example, advocates the principle of dissim-
ilation, yielding a kind of comparison that brings together disparate texts to throw
into relief their distinctive, inassimilable features and to comprehend literature in
terms of its inherent otherness. At the same time, dissimilation brings to the fore
unexpected relations that do “not depend on the recognition of sameness” (Melas
xiii). Linking disparate texts to one another has a potentially transformative effect
on literary history because it reveals hitherto unnoticed connections and lin-
kages, while shedding new, defamiliarizing light on seemingly all too natural
literary forms. At the same time, this strategy can undo the center-periphery
model and attendant “diffusionist models of reading” (Friedman 518), which have
dominated literary history, and which presuppose that the West is an exclusive
site of aesthetic innovation (cf. Friedman 502). But a literary history that aspires
to a sense of globality also requires new concepts, period shapers, and generic
classifications, which can escape what Christopher Prendergast calls the Euro-
chronology problem. Though new literary histories have introduced terms such as
‘world modernism,’ ‘new world modernism,’ ‘transnational modernism,’ ‘postco-
lonial romanticism,’ and ‘magic realism,’ the categories of comparative literary
history, including the basic concepts of literature and history, are still steeped in
Western knowledge orders and often implicitly reinstate Western literature as a
standard of measure. The provincalizing (Chakrabarty) of European literary his-

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208 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

tory by means of coining categories and concepts derived from non-European

literatures remains a major challenge for further research in the field.3

2
Since its inception in 1964, CHLEL has been the most active force in investigating
comparative literary history, followed at a great distance by the Gorky Institute of
World Literature’s 1983–1994 unfinished world literary history (Berdnikov and
Vipper), Hans Hertel’s 1985–1993 Verdens litteraturhistorie, and Dionýz Ďurišin’s
1987–1993 history of interliterary communities. While the two founding premises
of the CHLEL project have remained unchanged during the last five decades –
namely, the complementation of traditional literary histories by comparative
histories and the international collaboration of scholars “to address transnational
and interdisciplinary topics” (Higonnet ix) are needed for these comparative
histories – it is in the rich variety of the over thirty CHLEL volumes where these
two premises materialize, get complicated, and are challenged. Of these materi-
alizations, complications, and challenges, three stand out and bear witness to
CHLEL’s inventiveness in order to rethink and overcome the shortcomings of
national literary history – new spatialities, interperiodology, and figural nodes.
It goes without saying that CHLEL restriction to literatures “in European
languages” has simultaneously been the fuel and the Achilles’ heel of this project.
What does “European languages” mean? For linguistics, most European lan-
guages belong to the Indo-European language family, which includes three large
phyla – Slavic, Germanic, and Romance. Of these languages, Russian has the
largest number of native speakers, and yet no CHLEL volume has addressed
literature in Russian, except for collateral investigations in relation to other Slavic
(mainly) and Germanic languages. Moreover, Europeans speak smaller phyla of
Indo-European (Albanian, Romani, Celtic), as well as non-Indo-European lan-
guages, some of which fall within the Uralic and Turkic families, and none of
which feature in the CHLEL volumes so far. In a foundational position paper by
Jean Weisgerber (third president of CHLEL and director of the volumes devoted to
the avant-gardes), it is claimed that though “[r]ejetant tout eurocentrisme, le
projet s’en tient cependant aux traditions européennes comme domaine de sa
compétence spécifique” (353). It is indeed a difficult balance, which, under the

3 See Mufti, who points out: “In order to dis-place and realign the axis of ‘comparison’ for our
discipline from Europe or the West to the planet, we will have to require a different kind of cultural
and intellectual range than we traditionally have.” (“Global Comparatism” 488)

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 209

light of the above-mentioned language phenomena (among others), we compli-

cate further by introducing the concept of delocalization.

2.1 Challenging Space

One of the most distinctive dimensions challenged by CHLEL is space. For tradi-
tional national literary history, space is an unproblematic category, for it is self-
evidently bounded by literary nationality, which is conflated with the national
language in question. Consequently, literature is seen as a static phenomenon at
the crossroads of language and the country where it is spoken. Thus, for example,
Mathie Richard Auguste Henrion’s 1827 Histoire littéraire de la France begins with
a discussion of the geographical location of France, which is instrumental for
addressing literature as “la différence des climats qui diversifie l’esprit des
peuples” (4). Likewise, in a foundational literary history for Spanish culture such
as George Ticknor’s 1849 History of Spanish Literature, “Spanish” makes reference
in turn to “literature that existed in Spain” (as indicated in the subtitle), which
opens up with “the formation of its present language and poetry” (6). This model
of the nation as a self-contained unit for literary production has been replicated
innumerous times since then, and not only by national literary histories, but also
by comparative ones, in which the inter-national horizon is understood as the
addition of national-literary units, as in J. C. L. Simonde de Sismondi’s 1813 De la
littérature du Midi de l’Europe, and Abel-François Villemain’s 1875 Tableau de la
littérature au Moyen Âge en France, en Italie, en Espagne et en Angleterre.
Though subtly nuanced, this sequence of national units is still present in the
earlier stages of CHLEL, especially in those volumes that have either a genre or a
period or movement as the object of discussion. The second part of Ulrich
Weisstein’s volume (CHLEL 1), for example, surveys expressionism in England,
the US, Scandinavia, Belgium and the Netherlands, Rumania, Hungary, Poland,
and Russia, with single chapters for each country. And Frederick Garber’s Roman-
tic Irony (CHLEL 8) includes a section titled “National Manifestations,” in which
the object of study is addressed within Germany, France, Portugal, the Nether-
lands, Scandinavia, Rumania, Poland, Russia, and the US, each in a single
chapter.
A change from country to other kinds of literary areas first became noticeable
in 1986 with Albert S. Gérard’s European-Language Writing in Sub-Saharan Africa
(CHLEL 6), the first volume to address literatures in European languages reloca-
lized in a different continent. In Gérard’s history, the corpus produced south of
the Sahara is considered a “fuzzy set,” for “there is neither compelling objective
evidence nor unquestioned agreement as to which works and which authors

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210 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

constitute ‘African literature’” (“Introduction” 23). Basic questions about the

geographical category (sub-Saharan Africa), however, remained unaddressed,
especially the one concerning the exclusion of the Mediterranean output from
“African literature.” Furthermore, relocalization seems to be understood as a one-
way process, for the history exclusively focuses on the “appropriation of Eur-
opean languages by African writers” (18).
Something similar may be said of A. James Arnold’s 1994–2001 comparative
literary history of the Caribbean (CHLEL 10, 12, and 15), in which the découpage
remains undefined despite the fact that the introduction to volume 1 is titled
“Charting the Caribbean as a Literary Region” – the first time the concept of
“literary region” was used in a CHLEL volume. Further steps towards a more
rigorous reflection on the rationale for literary areas other than countries were
taken in the volumes devoted to East-Central Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. In
the former case, it was the first CHLEL history to delimit a sub-European space as
opposed to the omnipresent continental borders (“European literature”) used by
histories that adopt a periodological formula. In fact, the comparative literary
history of East-Central Europe (CHLEL 19, 20, 22, and 25) invents its space in
response to other poetics, like those indicated by Mitteleuropa, Zentraleuropa,
Eastern Europe, and Central Europe. This territorial rebalancing between West and
East is due to “an ethical imperative” to further, “on however small a scale, the
communication between the peoples of that region” (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer,
“General Introduction” 15–16). And in the case of the volumes devoted to the
Iberian Peninsula (CHLEL 24 and 29), the geographical category has an unmistak-
ably systemic appearance that draws on José Lambert’s suggestion to speak about
literature in France, Germany, and Italy instead of French, German, and Italian
literature in order to both question relationships between literature and socio-
political structures and search for the heterogeneity that the national paradigm has
silenced. Notice, however, that this is not a comparative history of literatures in
Spain and Portugal, but in the Iberian Peninsula. This history aims at challenging
peninsularity as a recognizable and coherent unit, which reflects the attraction to a
literary body that is seen as immovable in its space. Both peninsularity and
continental liminality have played a key role in imagining Iberian literary ecosys-
tems.
Between the inception of the first regional histories of sub-Saharan Africa and
the Caribbean, on the one hand, and more full-fleshed discussions of geographical
alternatives to the national paradigm as represented by East-Central Europe, the
Iberian Peninsula and, more recently, Scandinavia, on the other hand, it is impera-
tive to mention Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir’s 2004 comparative literary history
of Latin America. Though not exactly a volume of the series, it is intrinsically related
to CHLEL due to the fact that Valdés was one of the presidents of the committee and

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 211

both this history of Latin America and the one of East-Central Europe form part of
the Literary History Project of the University of Toronto. What needs to be high-
lighted here is that the selection of a geographical area as a historiographical object
by the CHLEL regional histories is highly indebted to various works by Valdés in
which he reflects on the applications of Fernand Braudel’s methodology to the
literary field. “[T]he cultural space of Latin America consists of a geography and its
cultural centers,” Valdés claims, “that have been the sources of cultural produc-
tion.” (“From Geography to Poetry” 203) In The Mediterranean and the Mediterra-
nean World in the Age of Philip II, the “outstanding fact” that the Mediterranean is a
“sea ringed round by mountains,” which has received “too little attention in the
past from historians” (Braudel 25), is thoroughly examined. Likewise, Literary
Cultures of Latin America opens up with a section devoted to the geographic factors
and the formation of a cultural terrain – Latin America – in which the main identity
factors are “languages and a colonial past” (Valdés, “From Geography to Poetry”
203). Hervé Théry contributes to this comparative literary history with two funda-
mental works on literary geography. The first one deals with the singularity of Latin
America as a continent whose name refers to the culture that shaped it (“The
Formation of a Cultural Territory”), while the second one addresses the notion of
“cultural center” through the places of birth and death of writers (“The Main
Locations of Latin American Literature”). The result is an interesting reformulation
of the continental boundaries, for (delocalized) cities such as New York, Madrid,
and Paris become cultural centers of Latin America on an equal footing with Buenos
Aires, Mexico City, and Rio de Janeiro.
The idea of distinctive cultural centers of specific literary areas is further
explored in the forthcoming volume 1 of Nordic Literature (CHLEL 31) through
concepts such as waterscapes, cityscapes, lightscapes, and milleniumscapes. But
experimentation with space is not restricted to inter- or trans-national regions, but
also applies to smaller scales. Volume 2 of the History of the Literary Cultures of
East-Central Europe, for example, moves from the region’s macrostructures to a
microstructural focus to discuss what is called “marginocentric cities,” the ones
which have “encouraged a de/reconstruction of national narratives, a hybridiza-
tion of styles and genres, and alternative social and ethnic relations” as a result of
“their very marginality [...] as well as their multiethnic compositions” (Cornis-
Pope, “Introduction” 4–5). Examples of such marginocentric cities are Vilnius/
Wilno/Vilna, Cernãuţi/Czernowitz, Timişoara/Temesvar/Temesburg, Ruschuk/
Ruse, Shkodra/Işkodra/Skadar, Dubrovnik, and Trieste, among others. In short,
what these comparative histories aim to show is that, on the one hand, interliter-
ary relationships do not take place exclusively at the international level, and, on
the other hand, literature is a formative influence in the construction of space,
which is thus to be reconceived as open, fluid, and in the making.

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212 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

2.2 Challenging Time

Literary periods are conceptual fossils, unchanging axiological tools that merge a
distinctive style, movement, ideology, or trend into a slice of (national) time: Who
would dare to deny that Italian literature has not got ‘a Renaissance’ or English
literature an ‘Elizabethan era’? Literary periods have strong territorial bonds,
become true chronotopes (isn’t Romanticism intrinsically German and Neoclassi-
cism intrinsically French?), and migrate from one area to another. They delineate
a monolineal sequence of ‘progress,’ characteristically in European literature
from the Middle Ages to contemporary times. In comparative literary history,
three approaches to literary periods have been adopted. First, they are expanded
from national to transnational boundaries in order to replicate the monolineal
sequence on a bigger scale. Second, alternative ways of time slicing are proposed.
And, third, national literary periods are challenged in order to build a truly
transnational periodology. To a larger or lesser extent, all these three approaches
are present in CHLEL and have deep implications in terms of understanding
literary delocalization.
The expansion from national to transnational boundaries was dominant
during most of CHLEL’s history, from volume 1 to volume 18, with the exception
of the volumes devoted to sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean, which from
Volume 19 onwards are followed by those devoted to East-Central Europe, the
Iberian Peninsula, and Scandinavia – the so-called subseries on “regional his-
tories” (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures 1: xi). Typi-
cally, a volume, or set of volumes, addresses a specific time slice that voices a
movement (expressionism, symbolism, modernism, postmodernism, the forth-
coming volumes on Realism), a genre in conjunction with a period (Romantic
irony, drama, poetry, and nonfictional prose), or a period (the Renaissance, the
Modernité, the Aufklärung). As mentioned earlier, these units are discussed within
national boundaries, so that the comparative dimension emerges from both the
distinctiveness of the ‘national period’ and the concluding essays with a transver-
sal approach, in which the re- and delocalizations of these temporal units are
addressed.
Interestingly, experimentation with alternative ways of time slicing has been
more widely adopted within the regional subseries. One of these experiments
consists of singling out literary years, as first implemented in a national literary
history – Denis Hollier’s A New History of French Literature. This history includes
175 essays, each one linked to a specific year between 778 and 1989 in order to
convey the “heterogeneity that escapes the linearity of traditional literary his-
tories” (xix). Such temporal construction has full-fleshed theoretical precedents
in Hans Robert Jauß’s discussion of the lyric in 1857 and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 213

literary history of 1926, and has been applied to comparative history by Cornis-
Pope and Neubauer by, first, singling out temporal nodes, which may consist of
either a single year or a cluster of years (due to local nuances); second, organizing
the sequence retrospectively, from 1989 to 1789/1781/1776, for history can only be
built from the present; and, third, restricting the temporal sequence to just the
first of the four volumes composing the History of the Literary Cultures of East-
Central Europe. Both the retrospective sequence and the restriction to a section of
the literary history are indebted to the so-called “Ricouer/Braudel model,” which
“gives us procedures for approaching complex historical conglomerates of com-
parative literary history” (Valdés, “The Hermeneutics” 92).
As for the third alternative, namely, the elaboration of a truly transnational
periodology, though to some extent present in some of the CHLEL volumes (Vo-
lume 1 of A Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula, for example,
includes a section devoted to temporal frames and literary [inter-]systems), it has
been more deeply discussed by Ďurišin in his preliminary theoretical approaches
to a history of interliterary communities. A transnational periodology results from
two “landmarks of periodization,” bilateral, which is based on relationships
between two literary systems with special attention to the internal dynamics of the
target system, and multilateral, which is focused on the synthesis emerging from
the process of world literature (Ďurišin, Theory 239–251).
In Mieke Bal’s terms, one can say that literary periods are travelling concepts
par excellence, whose raison d’être is relocation. In Europe, no literature can
claim the exclusive ownership of a period (except, maybe, for those whose
definition is based upon political specificity). Literary periods “are not fixed,” but
rather “[t]hey travel – between disciplines, between individual scholars, between
historical periods, and between geographically dispersed [and contiguous re-
gions and] academic communities” (Bal 24). While the new meanings acquired
during these spatial travels have thoroughly been addressed in the CHLEL
volumes, interartistic relocations have received less attention. Consider, for ex-
ample, the travel of magic realism from Europe (as originally applied to painting)
to Latin America to voice a literary identity of its own, amply showing that periods
are both object of reappropriation and sites of intercultural negotiation.

2.3 Challenging Narrative

In his seminal study on literary history, David Perkins has argued that “literary
history may fulfill the essential criteria of narrative, for it may and very often
describes a transition through time from one state of affairs to a different state of
affairs, and a narrator reports this transition to us” (29). We have already dealt

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214 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

with several ways of challenging narrative in comparative history in previous

sections. Here we want to focus on the one that most directly interrogates the
traditional understanding of a specific literature as the “hero” of the narrative
that emerges “from obscurity and gradually flourishes” (29). This specific chal-
lenge is represented by figural nodes as elaborated in volume 4 of the History of
the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Rather than looking at institutions,
general policies, and trends, the term figure has been chosen due to its multiple
meanings. “In a narrow sense, we use it to refer to actual historical figures and
literary characters as types and stereotypes,” Neubauer and Cornis-Pope claim
(7). And they add, “the term is also relevant to our project in the sense of
linguistic ‘figure,’ as rhetorical transposition or transformation” (7). Such figural
nodes include national poets, glorified political leaders, legendary outlaws, and
quasi-mythic figures like Dracula and the Golem. Take the case of the haiduk
(outlaw) as figural node, which has been influential in fostering “literary aware-
ness of the nation formation in Central and Eastern Europe during the nineteenth
century” by “involving an intense back- and forth of literary activities and
influences – from country to country, from East to West and vice versa” (Leerssen
et al. 408, 410).
Though Neubauer and Cornis-Pope’s characterization is intrinsically related
to processes of re- and delocalization, such processes are obviously limited in
their history to the boundaries of East Central Europe. This national/regional
limitation seems to be integral, furthermore, to imagology’s tenets, as when, for
example, it is claimed that “Don Quixote and Don Juan embody certain Spanish
attributes” (Beller 375). National figural nodes are sites for negotiating self-defini-
tions and collective memories and, moreover, it is their hybrid elaboration (a self-
definition as being non-Other) that makes possible their relocation and appropria-
tion by the Other, and, hence, transformation into nodes of transnational and
global memory. Consider the cases of Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote and
Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni or, to go beyond Manfred Beller’s examples (and
geography), Derek Walcott’s Omeros.
However thought-provoking these ways of challenging narrative are, we do
not have as yet anything similar to modernist experimentations with the novel
and short story. Literary history, comparative included, is still very conservative
in this regard, for “all that it does give must hang together” (Perkins 48). Such a
view implies breaking literature off life, in which fluidity, ambiguity, and contra-
diction are as important as the appearance of order. Pollination of literary history
by digital humanities may provide tools for addressing such fluidity, ambiguity,
and contradiction, which in fact will grow exponentially due to the possibility of
processing and interpreting big and networked cultural data sets. An important
caveat in this regard is the need of overcoming Anglo-monolingualism, typical of

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 215

digital humanities so far, a problem for which pollination by comparative litera-

ture is a solution.

3
The four articles here gathered aim to discuss the interplays and tensions between
global perspectives and European literary histories. Margaret R. Higonnet, in “A
Challenge to Global Literary History: The Case of World War I,” makes use of WWI
as a testing ground for provincializing the Eurocentric focus of histories of war
literature. By acknowledging that the period of WWI represents a newly inter-
linked global world of communications, Higonnet resorts to texts by writers from
the periphery – the 1916 poem “Año Nuevo” (The New Year) by the Chilean
Vicente Huidobro, the 1919 short story “Birodha” (Mutiny) by the Bengali Svarna-
kumari Devi, and the 1926 autobiographical narrative Force-Bonté (Goodness-
Power) by the Senegalese Bakary Diallo, as well as oral traditions. Through their
analysis, Higonnet makes visible the complex temporality of this epoch, the
multicultural contexts from which these works emerge, and the long-term recov-
ery of texts. This analysis is instrumental for any future comparative history of
WWI literature, which needs to, on the one hand, encompass the range across
cultures of oral as well as written and visual as well as verbal arts and, on the
other hand, expand our understanding of ‘peripheral’ contributions.
In “Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in Anglophone World Literatures – Compara-
tive Histories of Literary Worlding,” Birgit Neumann discusses the dissatisfaction
with approaches that understand world literature exclusively in terms of circula-
tion and turn to distant reading; she advocates the expansion of world literary
studies to include literary acts of worldmaking. Worldmaking is a distinct force and
agency whereby a literary work creates a world of its own, which may introduce
frictions that cannot be understood in the terms established by a global market.
Such a premise requires a distinct way of understanding worldmaking, which
Neumann establishes around the double gesture of translating between transcul-
tural connectivity and topographical singularity. After surveying literary worlding
in Anglophone literatures, Neumann concludes that a comparative history that
takes seriously the agency of literary worldmaking entails new principles of com-
parison, which are deduced from the literary text itself rather than imposing pre-
given paradigms from without.
Karen-Margrethe Simonsen discusses in “Heterogeneic Time: An Anachronis-
tic and Transcultural Rethinking of Eurochronology” the relation between time
and transcultural space in literary history. Her point of departure is the concept of
anachronism, which can help to understand the complexity of temporality in

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216 César Domínguez and Birgit Neumann

intercultural terms. Simonsen bases her analysis on the case study of magic
realism novels as examples of transcultural and anachronistic relations between
Europe and Latin America. Anachronism is understood as a critique of Eurochro-
nology’s two dimensions, modernity and rationality, and no longer as a mistake
in the historian’s approach to historical reality. One of her main claims is that a
world literary history should not only incorporate new and previously unacknow-
ledged literatures, but also rethink the multiple historicities of concrete transcul-
tural exchanges.
In “On Writing a Comparative Literary History: Delocalizing Minor Literatures
in European Languages in the Age of ‘Big Data’”, César Domínguez, Giovanna Di
Rosario, and Matteo Ciastellardi claim that cross-pollination between digital
humanities and comparative literature may be instrumental for any attempt at a
future (Braudelian) comparative history of minor literatures. This is a triply
introductory essay, for it addresses three preliminary steps towards such com-
parative history – conceptual clarification, a map of cross-pollination between
digital humanities and comparative literature, and a bibliometric analysis of the
term minor literature in the Modern Language Association International Bibliogra-
phy. Regarding conceptual clarification, in contrast to the overwhelming pre-
sence of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s conceptual choice and definition,
other genealogies – Franz Kafka’s, Milan Kundera’s, Dubravka Ugrešić’s – are
explored. The map of cross-pollination between digital humanities and compara-
tive literature shows the need for the former to overcome its pervading Anglo-
monolingualism and the need for the latter to embrace digital tools so as to
interpret big and networked cultural data sets, which are necessary for a Braude-
lian comparative history. Finally, a bibliometric analysis shows how minor litera-
tures have been catalogued, the growth of resources per decades and languages,
and the type of documents and their languages.
Jointly, the essays assembled in this special issue open up an array of new
perspectives on the exciting and rich field of global and comparative literary
histories. It is clear that the special issue is evocative rather than exhaustive and
that more research needs to be done to afford a multi-faceted and historically
nuanced understanding of how literatures within and across Europe intermingle.
We hope that the special issue contributes to stoking the discussion about how
the dynamic of delocation and location shape literary practices. Learning to
analyze and represent globality in literature remains a challenge for comparative
literary history.

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 Introduction: Delocalizing European Literatures 217

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