John Burt Foster is Professor of World and Comparative Literature at George Mason University, USA. He is the author of "Heirs to Dionysus: A Nietzschean Current in Literary Modernism "(""Princeton University Press, 1981) and "Nabokov's Art Memory and European Modernism" (Princeton University Press, 1993) and the editor, with Wayne J. Froman, of "Dramas of Culture: Theory, History, Performance" (Lexington Books, 2008). He is past editor of "The Comparatist," an annual journal for comparative literary study, and now edits "Recherche litteraire / Literary Research," a bilingual international journal in the same field.