A yearbook sponsored by the British Comparative Literature Association asserting that comparative literary studies represent a major direction forwards.

List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Editor's note: the 'scientific' pretensions of comparative literature; Part I. Text and Reader: 1. Text and voice Gabriel Josipovici; 2. The indeterminacy of the text: a critical reply. Translated by Rodney Foster Wolfgang Iser; 3. Recognition and the reader Terence Cave; 4. Epic charm in the Old English and Serbo-Croatian oral tradition J. M. Foley; 5. The prisonhouse of language: The Heart of Midlothian and La Chartreuse de Parme Nicole Ward; 6. The community of the novel: Silas Marner John Preston; 7. Plot and the analogy with science in late nineteenth-century novelists Gillian Beer; 8. 'Point of view' and its background in intellectual history Lothar Hönnighausen; 9. Proust and the art of reading Leslie Hill; 10. Subversion of narrative in the work of André Gide and John Fowles David H. Walker; 11. The word in the novel. Translated by Ann Shukman Mikhail Bakhtin; 12. Between Marxism and Formalism: the stylistics of Mikhail Bakhtin Ann Shukman; 13. Intertextuality and the poetics of fiction Ann Jefferson; Part II. Translations: 14. Poems. Translated by Michael Hamburger Marín Sorescu; 15. Poems. Translated by Derek Bowman Günter Kunert; 16. 'The king in the golden mask', 'Herostratos, incendiary', 'Cecco Angiolieri, malevolent poet', 'Paolo Uccello, painter', 'The art of biography'. Translated by Iain White Marcel Schwob; Part III. Essay Reviews: 17. Figures in the carpet: on recent theories of narrative discourse Frank Kermode; 18. Written and unwritten: on Ruth Finnegan's Oral Poetry Jeff Opland; 20. German Poetry 1910-1975: on Michael Hamburger's anthology Gerald Gillespie; 21. A partial history of traduction: Borges in English Peter Hulme and Gordon Brotherson; Books received; Bibliography of comparative literature in Britain, 1977.