Book excerpt: This five-volume work presents the collected papers of the twenty-first congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA), which took place at the University of Vienna (Austria) from July 21st to July 27th 2016 and was dedicated to the general topic "The Many Languages of Comparative Literature". The contributions gathered in these volumes explore many of the countless ways in which language shapes not only ?national? literatures and ?world literature?, but also the discipline of comparative literature itself. As a whole, these proceedings highlight the opportunities and the challenges associated with the multilingualism of both the discipline and the objects of its study. Yet they also go beyond reflections on the scholarly language of comparative literature in order to investigate how language functions within diverse literary texts and their contexts. Contributors to this compilation are concerned, amongst other aspects, with the way the language used by different social and ethnic groups feeds into literary texts; with the vocabulary of theoretical and cultural discourses such as gender studies and ecocriticism; and with language in a metaphorical sense, as referring to certain codes, forms, or styles. Moving between the discussion of literature itself and the observation of how literature is being discussed, this collection testifies to the polyglot, diverse, and ever-evolving state of the discipline.