The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature is a collection of papers by influential scholars who are engaged in comparative literary studies and addresses a central and highly important question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to comparative literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem, of the discipline as well as of literary history, to accommodate non-Western traditions? Addressing this significant matter and taking different approaches in response to the state of the discipline, the papers in this volume offer diverse ways of overcoming Eurocentrism: the role of institutions and the changes they need to undergo; possible ways of practicing a truly global comparative literature; the history of the discipline outside Europe; premodern histories of ideas and the non-European origins of modernity; translation, orientalism and area studies; publishing and literary circulation; and modern technologies and their impact on literary dissemination and the discipline. This collection assesses comparative literature at a timely historical moment and will broaden the field by addressing the students and scholars of comparative literary studies all over the world with significant hints for more inclusive histories of world literature.

Zhang Longxi holds an MA in English from Peking University (1981) and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard (1989). He has taught at Peking, Harvard, the University of California, Riverside, and the City University of Hong Kong, and is currently Xiaoxiang Chair Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University and Li De Chair Professor at the Yenching Academy of Peking University. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities in 2009 and a foreign member of Academia Europaea in 2013. He was President of the International Comparative Literature Association from 2016-2019. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of World Literature and an Advisory Editor of New Literary History. He has published more than 20 books and numerous articles in both English and Chinese in East-West comparative studies. His books in English include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (1992); Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (1998); Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (2005); Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (2007); From Comparison to World Literature (2015), and more recently A History of Chinese Literature (2023) and World Literature as Discovery: Expanding the World Literary Canon (2024).

Omid Azadibougar was previously Professor of Comparative Literature at Hunan Normal University. He is the author of The Persian Novel: Ideology, Fiction and Form in the Periphery (2014), World Literature and Hedayat's Poetics of Modernity (2020), a co-editor of Persian Literature as World Literature (2021), and one of the founding editors and an editorial board member of Journal of World Literature.