ABSTRACT
Transnational literary studies are characterized by a kind of conglomeration of subfields including multicultural, world, postcolonial, diasporic, and border literatures. The first scholarly field to take a transnational approach to the study of literature was comparative literature. Originating in the early nineteenth century, comparative literature had developed into a full-fledged academic field by the end of the century. By pushing back against its historical Eurocentrism, postcolonial studies helped to dramatically expand the field of comparison opened by comparative literary studies. Like postcolonial studies, the field of border studies has since the early 1980s played a significant role in transnationalizing literary studies. Globalization studies have helped shift the ground upon which comparative literature, and postcolonial and border studies were built, and have helped in significant ways to shape both transnational literature and its study. The lines of demarcation between comparative literature, postcolonial, global, border, and diaspora studies have become increasingly—and productively—blurrier.
