About CHLEL
The Coordinating Committee for the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages Series (CHLEL) was launched by the ICLA in 1967. Its purpose is to publish a series of comparative historical studies, each edited by an international team of scholars. This ongoing project is based on two fundamental premises. First of all, the writing of literary histories confined to specific nations, peoples, or languages must be complemented by the writing of literary history that coordinates related or comparable phenomena from an international point of view. Secondly, it is almost impossible for individual scholars to write such comprehensive histories, which implies we must now rely on structured teamwork drawing collaborators from different nations. The editorial Coordinating Committee that supervises this series consists of sixteen scholars from various countries. New areas of focus include the historiography of literatures in European languages in a global world, literature in relation to different media and literary cultures, different temporalities of literary historiography.