Acknowledgements

We are happy to acknowledge the agency of the Fédération Internationale des Langues et Littératures Modernes (FILLM) in suggesting this volume’s germinal notion. In 2017, FILLM held its 27th Triennial Congress in Delhi with “The Familiar and the Exotic” as its main topic of discussion. This resulted in fruitful cross-cultural exchanges which subsequently inspired us to send out a global call for contributions to this challenging theme.

Our sincere thanks go to Margaret Higgonet, President of FILLM, for her moral support and scholarly skills in the collation of the materials submitted.

We would also like to thank Roger D. Sell, Series Editor of FILLM Studies, for his clear-sighted guidance, and for his constant encouragement and support. He made our task of editing widely diverse contributions to an important but problematic topic a lot easier.

Our warmest gratitude is due to Elleke Boehmer for having been our first reader, for helping to identify the critical shape underlying the different ideas ranging across this collection, and for suggesting a direction for their further consolidation.

We thank our contributors for well-researched essays which lend the volume’s main topic valuable concretion. We also thank them for ensuring that all copyright materials, both in textual quotations and in reproductions of images, is in accordance with fair use, and based on granted permissions.

Finally, we thank John Benjamins Publishing Company for recognizing the possibilities in the premise of the collection, and for giving us the opportunity to mount our critical concerns. We also applaud their generosity in instituting a prize for the best paper presented at a FILLM Congress, and thank them for conferring the inaugural award on our contributor, Vibha S. Chauhan.