The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative North American Literature. Ed. Reingard M. Nischik. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

• Martin Kuester

In general, the field of comparative literature encompasses not only different countries but also different languages. However in the age of McLuhan’s global village – the lingua franca of which is English – it might be beneficial to pay more attention to what has, in the German-speaking countries, been called “inneranglistische Kompara - tistik”: the comparison of Anglophone literatures from different parts of the world. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that this publication has been edited in Germany at the University of Konstanz, where Reingard M. Nischik has established an impressively productive group of first-rate scholars in the fields of American and Canadian literary and cultural studies. So it is unsurprising that while eleven of the seventeen contributors to this collection teach at German universities, at least seven of them have studied or worked with Nischik at the University of Konstanz. With understandable enthusiasm, Nischik states in the first sentence of her preface that this volume is “the very first of its kind in this research area”. While this is probably true, and while she shows that she has developed a “special research focus in Konstanz,” the later chapters of the book clearly show that this kind of research builds upon approaches that have existed in English and comparative literature programs in Canada and Europe for many years.