The paper specifies the notion of Central Europe in Czech, Polish and Hungarian comparative studies, delimiting the maximalist and the minimalist approaches which identified Central Europe with the area between the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Urals, or with the Habsburg Empire, respectively. Furthermore, it evaluates the three-volume project of M. Cornis-Pope and J. Neubauer et al., History of the Literary Cultures of the East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries I-III (Amsterdam - Philadelphia, 2004-2007) which introduces, using the typological method of historical-geographical modelling, the concept of East-Central Europe.