The ninth volume of this annual journal continues the consideration of the relations of European with non-European literatures begun in volume 8.

List of illustrations; List of contributors; Acknowledgements; Frontispiece; Editor's introduction: 'Monsters methodiz'd': translating the Other; Part I. Cultural Perceptions and Literary Values: 1. Can we ever understand alien cultures? Partha Mitter; 2. Are there universals of performance? Victor Turner; Introduction: 'The Arts and all things common': Victor Turner's literary anthropology Barbara Babcock; 3. Aelian's peony: the location of magic in Graeco-Roman tradition Richard Gordon; 4. Inca Fausts and Faustian Incas: two Quechua plays from vice-regal Peru Gordon Brotherston; 5. 'Playing with grief': Hamlet and the rituals of mourning Peter Hughes; 6. Montesquieu's corresponding images: cultural and sexual alterity in pseudo-oriental letters Joseph Th. Leersen; 7. Heroic repression: narrative and aesthetics in Shen Fu's Six Records of a Floating Life Jonathan Hall; Part II. Translations: 8. 'Of the lashing and crowning with thorns of my best-loved Christ'. A poem from the German Catherine Regina von Greiffenberg, translated by Sheenagh Pugh; 9. 'Rebirth'. A poem from the Persian Farogh Farrokhzad; Introduction: `The loaded heart' Martin Turner; 10. The heroic age: Hebbel to Ibsen. A chapter from The Evolution of Modern Drama Georg Lukács, translated by Stanley Mitchell; A note on Hebbel David Midgley; 11. Out of estrangement : opera for speaking voices in seven scenes Ernst Jandl; Introduction: 'Ernst Jandl: the creative comtradictions' Michael Hamburger; Part III. Essay Reviews: 12. Theory, etc. A review of Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction and Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory Stephen Heath; 13. How The Second Sex stopped my aunt from watering the horse chestnuts, or Simone de Beauvoir and contemporary feminism Nicole Ward Jouve; Books and periodicals received Mark Ogden; Bibliography of comparative literature in Britain and Ireland 1961-1965 Joseph Th. Leerssen and Glyn Tegai Hughes; Bibliography of comparative literature in Britain and Ireland 1984 Joseph Th. Leerssen.