The novel looms large on the horizon of global literary studies. It not only travels well, but is also widely perceived as futureoriented and open-ended, ready to absorb within its polymorphous ambit the indeterminacy of the present. In April 2019, New Literary History hosted a symposium on “The Global Novel: Comparative Perspectives,” with eight scholars who have expertise in various literary regions—East Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, North America, South Africa, and South Asia. This special issue has emerged out of the symposium. The contributors parse theories of the novel as a global form, and compare their relative provenance across diverse literary traditions. The collocation of terms “global,” “novel,” and “comparative” is a proverbial red-flag in a field beset with anxiety about untranslatability, incommensurability, and the contingent particularity of literary-linguistic worlds. The global is often perceived as a moniker of bad universalism; comparatism as the grammar of transnational biopower and a throwback to nineteenth-century evolutionary logics; and the novel as a malevolent form in an already fragile ecosystem of genres. Perceived as a form unbound by intricate aesthetic conventions, voraciously appropriative, and overwhelmingly marketable, the novel, in the words of Marthe Robert, “can do what it wants with literature; it can exploit to its own ends description, narrative, drama, the essay, commentary, monologue, and conversation; it can be, either in turn or at once, fable, history, parable, romance, chronicle, story and epic.”1 The conjunction of global with the novel generates considerable heartburn in some quarters about the form’s complicity with the forces of globalization, its rampant marketability, its abdication of its social role, and the banal professionalization through creative writing programs of a form that was once symptomatic of high aesthetic pursuit.2 Even as one registers this disquiet, literary scholars can scarcely miss the explosion of comparative scholarship on the global novel, a sure sign that this form is wide open for critical and historical evaluation. Recent scholarly work has embraced theories of comparative morphology

中文翻译：

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全球小说：比较视角介绍

在全球文学研究的视野中，这本小说大有作为。它不仅运行良好，而且还被广泛认为是面向未来和开放性的，随时准备在其多变的范围内吸收当前的不确定性。2019年4月，新文学史主持了一个主题为“全球小说：比较观点”的座谈会，八位学者在不同的文学领域-东亚，欧洲，拉丁美洲，中东，北美，南非和南亚。专题报告已经发表在专题讨论会上了。撰稿人将小说的理论作为一种全球形式进行分析，并比较他们在各种文学传统中的相对出身。“全局”，“新颖”和“比较”一词的搭配是一个困扰着不可翻译，不可通约性，以及文学语言世界的偶然特殊性。全球通常被认为是不良普遍主义的代名词。比较主义是跨国生物力量的语法，是对19世纪进化逻辑的一种抛弃；小说作为已经脆弱的流派生态中的恶意形式。这种小说被认为是不受复杂的审美习惯束缚的一种形式，以贪婪的专有性和绝大多数的可交易性来销售，用马特·罗伯特（Marthe Robert）的话说，“可以用文学来做它想做的事。它可以利用自己的目的来描述，叙述，戏剧，文章，评论，独白和对话；它可以是寓言，历史，寓言，浪漫，编年史，故事和史诗。“ 1全球性与小说的结合在某些方面引起了相当大的胃灼热，因为这种形式与全球化力量的共谋，其猖market的市场可售性，其对社会角色的退位以及通过创造性的写作计划（曾经是一种形式）的平庸专业化2甚至当人们注意到这一不安时，文学学者也几乎不会错过全球小说中比较学术的爆炸式增长，这肯定表明这种形式已经广泛接受批评和历史评价。最近的学术著作接受了比较形态学的理论 2即使人们注意到了这种不安，文学学者也几乎不会错过全球小说中比较学术的爆炸式增长，这肯定表明这种形式对于批评和历史的评价是敞开的。最近的学术著作接受了比较形态学的理论 2即使人们注意到了这种不安，文学学者也几乎不会错过全球小说中比较学术的爆炸式增长，这肯定表明这种形式对批评和历史的评价是敞开的。最近的学术著作接受了比较形态学的理论