ABSTRACT
As its name suggests, world literature – a branch of comparative literature once associated primarily with an established canon of mostly Western classical masterpieces – has embraced literatures written in non-Western languages more readily than the broader field of comparative literature. Moreover, intra-European comparative scholarship, indeed even intra–Western European comparative scholarship, is rarely if ever thought of as “area studies.” In contrast, despite the fact that East and South Asia both have twice the population of Europe and longer and more diverse cultural histories, intra–East Asian and intra–South Asian, even intra-Asian scholarship is sometimes dismissed as “area studies.” Intra-Asian comparative work dispels common and primarily Western misperceptions of the Asian continent as either a space of excess, extravagance, and near-chaos, one where commonalities are so general as to be insignificant, or as a space of near unchanging uniformity, an undifferentiated, even exotic immobile other.
