ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, a committee for the American Comparative Literature Association argued that comparatists had better move from their narrow literary areas into the larger field of culture study or they would be left on the “dustheap of history” (Bernheimer, et al., 5). Literary study has been around for a very long time, not only in the West, but throughout much of the world; the likelihood that literary study will ever be left on the dustheap of history seems slim. Nonetheless, it is clearly shortsighted for literary researchers and other humanists to ignore important trends in other fields that bear directly on the arts. One such trend is culture study. Many anthropologists, sociologists, and historians have moved toward culture study in the past twenty years. They have developed methods and isolated topics that enrich literary and artistic analyses. Literary critics and theorists have responded by developing the study of culture still further, producing work that not only applies culturalist insights, but helps to reshape the field itself.
