Welcome
Founded in 1963, Comparative Literature Studies publishes critical comparative essays on literature, cultural production, the relationship between aesthetics and political thought, and histories and philosophies of form across the world. Articles may also address the transregional and transhistorical circulation of genres and movements across different languages, time periods, and media. CLS welcomes a wide range of approaches to comparative literature, including those that draw on philosophy, history, area studies, Indigenous, race, and ethnic studies, gender and sexuality studies, media studies, and emerging critical projects and methods in the humanities. Each issue of CLS also includes book reviews of significant monographs and collections of scholarship in comparative literature.
CLS is an affiliated journal of the American Comparative Literature Association. With the ACLA, it sponsors the annual A. Owen Aldridge Prize for the Best Essay by a Comparative Literature Graduate Student, and subsequently publishes a revised version of the winning essay.
Recent and forthcoming special topics of CLS include “Redesigning Modernities,” “World Communist Poetics,” and “African Literatures and Form.”
Recent honors for the journal include the award of the 2023 Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) Article Prize to Jarvis McInnis (Duke) for the essay “A ‘Reorder of Things’ in Black Studies: Sacred Praxis, Phono(geo)graphy, and the Counter-Archive of Diaspora,” published in the special issue “New Critical Directions in Global South Studies, Continuing the Conversation” (59.1; 2022).
CLS is published at The Pennsylvania State University under the auspices of the Department of Comparative Literature. Its ISSN is 0010-4132. Journal contents are indexed in EBSCO Academic Search, Current Abstracts, and Electronic Journals Service; ISI Thomson’s Arts and Humanities Citation Index; ISI MLA Periodicals Directory; JournalSeek; OCLC ArticleFirst; and Ulrich’s Periodicals Directory.
CLS is a member of Project Muse, where full-text versions of articles can be found. You can also reach us at the Pennsylvania State University Press.