Walter Erhart is professor for German literature and literary studies at Universität Bielefeld. He received his habilitation from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and his doctorate from Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen. His research areas are German literature from the 18th to the 21st century, literary theory, history of the humanities, travel literature, masculinity and gender studies.
Johannes Grave, born 1976, is professor of art history at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and principal investigator at the collaborative research centre »Practices of Comparing«. For his research on art around 1800, early renaissance painting and picture theory he has been awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis 2020. He is a member of the scientific advisory board of Bielefeld University Press.

Frontmatter 1
Contents 5
Acknowledgements 7
Practices of Comparing 11
Preliminary Typology of Comparative Utterances 39
Incomparability 87
Odysseus, Blackbirds, and Rain Barrels 111
Where Do Rankings Come From? 137
The Weight of Comparing in Medieval England 173
The Shifting Grounds of Comparison in the French Renaissance 199
Comparison and East-West Encounter 213
Japan as the Absolute 'Other' 229
"Goût de Comparaison" 257
Inventing White Beauty and Fighting Black Slavery 295
The Politicisation of Comparisons 329
Genealogies of Modernism 349
Comparing in the Digital Age 377
Authors and Editors 401