In early March 2020, plans for the British Comparative Literature Association’s Triennial Conference were well underway. Venues had been booked, panels had been scheduled, and social activities arranged. We, the organizing committee, Professor Francesca Orsini, Dr Nicola Thomas and Dr Kelsie Donnelly, took the necessary steps to ensure that nothing was left to chance. Until, of course, it became clear that the theme of our event, ‘randomness’, was becoming more relevant and prescient in ways we had not foreseen. With the arrival of coronavirus or COVID-19 and subsequent cancellation of the conference, the words of Robert Burns’ poem ‘To a Mouse’ rang in our ears, ‘The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft a-gley’.1
While governments across the globe scrambled for solutions and strategies, we implemented a contingency plan of our own. In September 2020, in collaboration with fellow members of the BCLA Executive Committee, we hosted the online roundtable ‘Randomness and Culture in the Age of Quarantine’ with keynote lectures by Dr Peter Arnds, Professor Mads Rosendahl Thomsen, Professor Kylie Crane and Professor Maghiel Van Crevel, all of which are published in this special issue of Comparative Critical Studies. This event posed a series of questions, including: how can culture help us come to terms with this (seemingly) unprecedented situation? What does it mean to cogitate in gated communities, to think and to write in enforced isolation? What, indeed, is randomness and how does it manifest in literary culture?
Comparative Critical Studies, vol. 18. 2-3, published by Edinburgh University Press, is now available online:
Special double issue: Randomness
Guest edited by Kelsie Donnelly, Francesca Orsini and Nicola Thomas
https://www.euppublishing.com/toc/ccs/18/2-3
Table of Contents:
————————————————————————
Notes on Contributors
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: v-viii.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0398?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Kelsie Donnelly, Francesca Orsini, and Nicola Thomas: Guest Editors’ Introduction
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 123-141.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0399?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Megha Agarwal: Chance Encounters with Literature, Language and Meaning in John Williams’ Stoner and Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 145-163.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0400?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Maghiel Van Crevel: No One in Control? China’s Battler Poetry
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 165-185.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0401?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Peter Arnds: Random Pandemic Perambulations: A Brief History of Literary Walks in the Age of Corona
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 187-207.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0402?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Ruth Karin Lévai: Subject to the Law of Reason while Belonging to the World of Sense: the Inevitable Randomness of Human Experience in The Brothers Karamazov and ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 209-223.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0403?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Mads Rosendahl Thomsen: The Values of Imperfection
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 225-238.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0404?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Kylie Crane: Thinking Fungi, or Random Considerations
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 239-258.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0405?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Jihan Zakarriya: Randomness and Political Complexity in the Contemporary Arab Novel
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 259-283.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0406?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Jonathan Y. H. Hui: A Serendipitous Comparison? Jin Yong and J. R. R. Tolkien: Genre, Prosimetrum and Modern Medievalism East and West
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 285-307.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0407?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Kanupriya Dhingra: The ‘D-Books’ of Daryaganj Sunday Book Market
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 309-326.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0408?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Laura Lucia Rossi: Review: Giulia De Gasperi and Joseph Pivato, eds, Comparative Literature for the New Century
Comparative Critical Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2-3: 327-335.
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/ccs.2021.0409?ai=t5&ui=ydv&af=T
————————————————————————
Comparative Critical Studies is the journal of the British Comparative Literature Association.
