Editors' Introduction

Abstract

This special issue marks the inauguration of our editorship of Comparative Critical Studies (CCS), the house journal of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA). We are a motley group of four -with diverse but intersecting areas of expertise, at differing stages of our careers, and with varied degrees of (un)preparedness for the vicissitudes of journal editing! -but we share in common an intellectual interest in and practical commitment to Comparative Literature. In this special issue, which happily coincides with CCS's twentieth year of publication, we begin our editorship by taking stock of how Comparative Literature has grown in the pages of this journal over the past decades, of where the discipline currently stands, and of those paths it may pursue in the coming years. In so doing, we hope to at once honour the immense work of editors past in building CCS into the UK's foremost journal for comparative literary research, as well as to introduce ourselves to the journal's readership through a snapshot of each of our particular investments in the field. The articles gathered here aim not for comprehensiveness or representativeness; indeed, we reckoned early on in the process of curating this issue with the futility of those rubrics given the wonderfully shape-shifting and necessarily plural character of our discipline. Instead, this issue offers provocations on what Comparative Literature looks like -and on what it can or should look like -in both theory and practice. We invite our readers to join in this conversation on 'how we compare', a conversation to which we invite consensus and dissension of all kinds, and one we hope to further nurture in CCS's pages during our term as editors.We take as our point of departure the CCS special issue edited by Robert Weninger in 2006, at the beginning of his long tenure as the journal's editor, entitled Comparative Literature at a Crossroads? Our present issue figures as a companion of sorts to that earlier special issue,