Open research questions in Comparative and World Literature
60 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 4,961 Comparative and World Literature papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
The paper outlines several gaps in existing scholarship, including the lack of intersectional readings that consider the interplay between gender and class, and the under-explored potential for music and Western cultural signifiers as active mediators, not just decorative, in the construction of cultural hybridity.
Between East and West: Postmodern Selfhood and Cultural Mediation in Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood · 2026 · DOIThe interdisciplinary studies have several significant potentialities available in the course of this study. Firstly, the advent of digital humanities is expanding the possibility to trace even greater amounts of translated Romantic literature in the perspective of AI-based sentiment analysis and machine learning to a more detailed perspective of the tendencies of global reception. Research interpretation With the decolonization of the world literary canon, future research ought to consider the ethics of translation that are coupled with the strategies of domesticating vs. foreignizing in the future as well. The other interesting direction is the implementation of the Neuro-Translation Studies so as to test the effect (emotional and cognitive) of the Keatsian synesthesia on the emotion and thought of the non-native (without having any biometric information) readers. Further, using the term to refer to eco-Romanticism may be enlarged to explore the meaning of landscape imagery in the translation to the current environmental management and eco-consciousness of the contemporary movement around the world. Last but not least, there is a need to continually reevaluate the redefinition of the Romantic values into the digital era as it gives way to the post- dark landscapes of criticism. The research can be applied in further studies so that the cross-cultural significance of the literary content could be maintained as culturally relevant and scientifically quantifiable in the world, which becomes interconnected and digital through such points of encounter between technology, ethics and cultural management.
Romantic Ideals of Keats and Byron in Translation: Cultural Nuance and Global Resonance · 2026 · DOIFurther investigation into the role of translation, digital humanities, and mul- 15 timodal texts in shaping transcultural encounters would also be fruitful.
The Hermeneutics of Encounter: Re-evaluating Iser's Gaps and Jauss's Horizon in Transcultural Reading Practices · 2026 · DOIThis is particularly evident in Müller’s narrative, where the traces of traduction en filigrane are noticeably fewer; as a tourist translator with limited knowledge of the city and its traditions, she has fewer cultural elements to process and integrate into her text, which results in a more surface-level representation of Istanbul.
While Roma mobilities have long been studied from sociological and anthropological perspectives—especially post-WWII and after the fall of the Iron Curtain—their literary implications remain underexplored.
While he is a recognizable author among Polish readers, and all of his prose works, along with most of his essay collections, are consistently published in Polish translations shortly after their original English release, accompanied by substantial media and promotional attention, academic studies on Rushdie by Polish scholars remain relatively scarce.
The works of Mykola Lazorskyi testify that he had delicate involvement into the past historical epochs and was interested in the fates of famous and little known figures who were engaged in the anti-colonial struggle of Ukrainians and served as a model for imitation in the realm of the national resistance and preservation of ethnic identity and national traditions.
They show his commitment throughout his production—a commitment to penetrate the surface of society and focus on the many facets of life, on the underreported and underestimated, and on the often harshly neglected members of society, whose plight he reveals or sharply accentuates, at times through another person's friendly gesture or an act of kindness.
The author also points to the characteristic paradox of the Polish metahistorical discourse: despite a fundamental lack of agreement on subjective or objective entanglement of Poland and Poles in the system of colonial relations, we are dealing with — especially in literature studies — an intense exploration of the various aspects of relations identified as (post)colonial.
The aim of our paper is to point out the presence of such Bulgarian writers who have been translated into Slovak after 1989 and whose life and work touch on certain aspects of the “poetics of dislocation” and the issue of “migration” and thus open questions of existence abroad, emigration or exile.
POETICS OF DISLOCATION: BULGARIAN LITERATURE IN SLOVAK CULTUREAFTER YEAR 1989 (WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE NOVEL 18% OF GRAYFROM ZACHARY KARABASHLIEV) · 2020 · DOIIt is proved that the culture, life and people’s mode of the exotic East as an object of literary image, psychologically convincing reproduction of the individual in a person and in each individual ethnos are inherent in the works of Ukrainian writers, whose biographies are connected with unknown and little known areas of the Russian Empire.
This research project, in conjunction with the already published correspondence of Jerzy Giedroyc with the notable representatives of the post-war emigration, has brought to light hitherto little known documents that reveal the impact of non-political factors on the creation of the Polish modern literary canon.
Jerzy Giedroyc and Marian Pankowski’s Letters about the Novel Matuga: A Note on Pankowski’s Relationship with the Paris Kultura Magazine · 2017 · DOI1 However, in spite of the remarkable growth of Glissant's audience-spurred by the emergence of Caribbean literatures, the popularity of Francophone topics, the worldwide rise of discourses such as cultural studies and postcolonial studies, and, it must be said, the persistent questioning of identity-his work remains to be read.
In a troubling instance of historical synchronicity, that hierarchy is underpinned by another which sees the secondary role assigned to women in the nineteenth century perpetuated by contemporary scholarship: despite a growing interest in the cultural transfer between Germany and Spain, to date the role of women, in particular translators, in German Hispanism has not been explored.
CULTURAL HIERARCHIES AND THE GLOBAL CANON: GERMAN HISPANISM, TRANSLATION AND GENDER IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY · 2013 · DOI--Roi Patursson FAROESE LITERATURE is scarcely over a hundred years old but it carries with it a past in which the authors continually write about place, nation, people, and history thus making Faroese literature the most important part of the process of cultural mapping and memory in the Faroe Islands.
Mapping and Contact Zones: Space and Place in Jorgen-Frantz Jacobsen's Barbara and William Heinesen's De Fortabte Spillemond · 2009Through a reading of Jane Jeong Trenka's 2003 <unl>The Language of Blood</unl>, a memoir of growing up as a Korean adoptee in Minnesota, I explore the meaning of the failure of these kinship paradigms in transnational adoption and propose that the psychic and political economies of kinship need to be examined together in light of the growing global diaspora of transnational adoptees.
I begin with the assumption that if we, as students of marginal disciplines, do not wish to be confined permanently to the outer boundaries of the Humanities, vainly communicating only with ourselves, if we do not wish to speak the language of others, limited by their questions and answers, we must reflect on our own situation, study our own practices, and discuss our own theoretical crisis.
We have rather too frequently thought about comparative literature as if its motivating force were always some theme common to several literatures, and as if these literatures were limited to the historico-geographical space in which the migratory theme takes up residence and progressively ‘evolves’.
Of course, all these pluriversalisms remain to be deployed in much greater detail, in struggles as well as in thought and creation – but the next pluriversalist revolutions belong to us all collectively.
Towards a Pluriversal Europe? The Performance Dispak Dispac'h – Crépuscule européen from Patricia Allio and Her Co-Creators as a Shift from the Universalist Monologue to Pluriversalist Dialogues · 2026 · DOIThe image of the Other in Kočić’s oeuvre represents a literary reality, which, as such, remains insufficiently researched, and through which various poetic aspects of his works can be viewed.
While prior scholarship has foregrounded the cultural and spiritual significance of the bhakti movement, the translational operations that mediate the transmission of its poetics and ethos remain underexplored.
This article, while limited to a purely theoretical endeavour, aims to reframe some of our assumptions on the communication of wide-reaching, fundamental concepts within a given field.
The aim of the article is to demonstrate how this contemporary type of discourse contributes to a revaluation of Cărtărescu’s writing in the national sphere, where world literature theories have not been widely explored yet and where Cărtărescu’s novels have sometimes received divergent opinions.
As a complex phenomenon, it should be studied by referring to various testimonies, in which we can include the translation itself and newspaper articles.
We rely on interdisciplinary studies that shed light on the literary process in contact with other arts for the argumentation of some literary attributes of Serbian Moderna, as well as for the explication of some of its under-researched characteristics.
Most-cited papers in Comparative and World Literature
- Theorizing the Social Through Literary Fiction: For a New Sociology of Literature · Cultural Sociology · 2020 · 37 citations
- What’s (in) a Vignette? History, Functions, and Development of an Elusive Ethnographic Sub-genre · Ethnos · 2022 · 29 citations
- Culture inside: Scale, intimacy, and chronotopic stance in situated narratives · Language in Society · 2020 · 23 citations
- Literary celebrity reconsidered · Celebrity Studies · 2014 · 21 citations
- Literary quality in the eye of the Dutch reader: The National Reader Survey · Poetics · 2020 · 19 citations
- Translanguaging in performance or performance in translanguaging · Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development · 2022 · 18 citations
- Critical multiculturalism and countering cultural hegemony with children's literature · Waikato journal of education · 2022 · 18 citations
- The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures · New Literary History · 1978 · 17 citations
- Authority, Performance, and Interpretation in Religious Reading: Critical Issues of Intercultural Communication and Multiple Literacies · Journal of Literacy Research · 2003 · 17 citations
- Three branches of literary anthropology: Sources, styles, subject matter · Ethnography · 2018 · 15 citations
Most recent work
- Translation as Healing · Cultural Critique · 2026
- Translators’ diaries as seminal Romanian texts on translation: A study of Antoaneta Ralian’s and Irina Mavrodin’s works · Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies · 2026
- Equivalence in the Romanian translation of Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic · Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies · 2026
- <b>Cross-Cultural Perspectives in Literature: A Comparative </b> · Frontiers in Social Sciences Research · 2026
- Arhipelagul Mihail Sebastian · Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies · 2026
- Dialogue of Cultures in the Poetics of Eastern and Western Literature · Journal of Azerbaijan language and education studies. · 2026
- The Hermeneutics of Encounter: Re-evaluating Iser's Gaps and Jauss's Horizon in Transcultural Reading Practices · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- XIV ASR O‘ZBEK ADABIYOTIDA MIGRANTLAR HAYOTINING AKS ETISHI · Ijtimoiy-gumanitar sohada ilmiy-innovatsion tadqiqotlar · 2026
- THE INTERPRETATION OF SPACE AND TIME (CHRONOTOPE) IN UZBEK NOVELS OF THE INDEPENDENCE PERIOD · Asian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research · 2026
- LA LINEA DELL’ORIZZONTE, A FIRST ETHNO-GRAPHIC EXPERIENCE: THE POSSIBILITIES AND LIMITS OF COMICS FOR ETHNOGRAPHY · Teorija in praksa · 2026
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