Addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

Volume 10, dedicated to 'Comedy, Irony, Parody', celebrates the first decade of Comparative Criticism in a light-hearted vein. Michael Silk opens with a wide-ranging essay asserting the primacy of comedy and declaring its independence of tragedy. T. L. S. Sprigge explores philosophers who dared to write on laughter: Schopenhauer and Bergson. Bernard Harrison looks at the twentieth century's favourite comic novel, Tristram Shandy, in the light of Locke's views on 'the particular'. Peter Brand pursues the theatrical arts of disguises, masking, and gender-swapping through Renaissance Europe, from Ariosto to Shakespeare. Jane H. M. Taylor traces the danse macabre in modern 'black humour'. Christine Brooke-Rose, distinguished novelist and critic, reads from and comments on her own witty fictions. Michael Wood describes how Lolita outwitted her seducer.

This volume explores a theme that has become central in our time, as 'the death of God' is widely seen to be succeeded by 'the death of Man'. Our contributors set forth its urgency in a variety of contexts. Among these, Peter Stern gives the paradigmatic history of the bereft, damaged, and repudiated self in German philosophy and literature from Kleist to Ernst Jilnger. In 'Not I' Michael Edwards pursues the theological and psychological consequences of a self without substance. Peter France supplies a witty account of the marriage of self and commerce more at home in the eighteenth-century tradition of British empiricism, and the challenge of Rousseau's refusal of the terms of commerce. Raman Selden explores views of the self from the Romantics to the poststructuralists. Roger Cardinal probes the secret diary: is the genre a contradiction in terms? Stephen Bann explores the representations of Narcissus in recent psychoanalytic theory. Other contributors include Pierre Dupuy, David James, Julie Scott Meisami, Gregory Blue,Mark Ogden and A. D. Nuttall.

This 1981 volume addresses literary theory and criticism, comparative studies in terms of theme, genre movement and influence, and interdisciplinary perspectives.

This timely volume takes stock of the discipline of comparative literature and its theory and practice from a Canadian perspective. It engages with the most pressing critical issues at the intersection of comparative literature and other areas of inquiry in the context of scholarship, pedagogy and academic publishing: bilingualism and multilingualism, Indigeneity, multiple canons (literary and other), the relationship between print culture and other media, the development of information studies, concerted efforts in digitization, and the future of the production and dissemination of knowledge. The authors offer an analysis of the current state of Canadian comparative literature, with a dual focus on the issues of multilingualism in Canada’s sociopolitical and cultural context and Canada’s geographical location within the Americas. It also discusses ways in which contemporary technology is influencing the way that Canadian literature is taught, produced, and disseminated, and how this affects its readings.