In Volume 15, 'The Communities of Europe', we mark the gradual approach to European unity by looking at Europe's intransigent variety. Henry Gifford looks at the place of the writer in European culture, and J. M. Ritchie examines what happens when the writer is displaced and dispossessed of his language through war, emigration and exile. Susan Bassnett opens up the uncharted reaches of Europe visited by travellers through the ages and the fables that still lurk at its fringes - 'here be monsters' - even in the educated imagination. The encounter of Europe with one of its 'others', North America, is probed with gusto by Armin Paul Frank. Malcolm Bowie explores intellectual frontiers in his speculations on the uses of Lacanian psychoanalysis for the arts; and Harold Fisch pursues the nature of interpretation itself as a mode of community. Hazard Adams remembers Northrop Frye, who pursued Humanist interpretation steadfastly throughout his life. Bakhtin, a major Russian writer and critic only recovered for us gradually from the effective obscurity of his inner exile under Stalin, is reviewed by Malcolm V. Jones. The nature of canon-making is reconsidered by Douwe Fokkema.
Romantic Irony, the latest volume in the massive Comparative History of European Literature, is reviewed by Gary Handwerk. The editor brings up to date the report of the state of Comparative Literature in Britain given in volume 1 (1979). The winners of the British Comparative Uterature Association Translation Competition (1991) for European Community languages are published here: John Felstiner for his renderings of Pablo Neruda's Spanish, and Lisa Sapinkopf for her translations from the French of one of Europe's major poets and translators, Yves Bonnefoy. Special Prizes for Chinese went to Richard King's powerful rendering of Liu Sola's challenging novel Chaos and All That based on her experiences as a child during the Cultural Revolution; and (second prize) to Jonathan O. Pease's translation of a classic Chinese poem by Wang Ling. Special prizes for Hebrew, Yiddish, or writing in any language on a Jewish theme went to Marzell Kay, for his translation of a short story, 'A Monument to a New Life', by the well-known Israeli fiction writer Yitzhak Oren, and (second prize) to John Felstiner for his renderings of the great German-Jewish poet Paul Celan.
This volume also includes the final section of Joseph Th. Leerssen's Bibliography of Comparative Literary Studies in Britain and Ireland, covering 1971-5, up to the beginning of the annual bibliographies published in this journal from 1976.