Search

In its introductory overview, the article discusses the genre shift from the postcolonial national allegory to global fiction, the turn-of-the-century demand for a political narrative having contributed to the “worlding” of Anglo-American literature. Contextually interpreting two examples of an emerging form of the geopolitical novel, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Transmission by Mohsin Hamid and Hari Kunzru, respectively, the paper reflects on their intertwining of the real and fictional worlds threatened by the side effects of globalization and evolving communication technologies. Having drawn on the US and British cultural and political heritage, both South Asian diasporic writers represent a cosmopolitan branch of anglophone prose that fictionalizes millennial trends and the socio-political aftermath of terrorist attacks of Islamists and computer hackers. Combining the characteristics of expatriates with the fluid identity of contemporary nomads, the young adult protagonists embody the non-obvious status of immigrants who have succumbed to the illusion of Americanization without proactive assimilation, undergoing cultural hybridization instead. The authors rethink the unhomely experience of expats whose failed efforts have caused resentment towards the host society and initiated radical reaction. They extend their novels’ frame of reference to overcome the stereotypes of migration writing and post-9/11 national trauma fiction, facilitating the transition from postcolonial to transnational literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Keywords: theory of the novel; global novel; genre fiction; Imraan Coovadia; Sylva Nze Ifedigbo EN theory of the novel global novel genre fiction Imraan Coovadia Sylva Nze Ifedigbo 243 250 8 04/28/22 20220401 NES 220401 The final chapter of Jeanne-Marie Jackson's I The African Novel of Ideas: Philosophy and Individualism in the Age of Global Writing i (2021) opens with a characterization of the novel as the genre I par excellence i of disruption, failure, and, via reference to György Lukács, the loss of totality. A booming subcategory of contemporary African writing, at the close of I The African Novel of Ideas i speculative fiction marks one possible way forward for thinking about thinking, so to speak, in the African novel and the novel at large. Per the closing lines of that final chapter of I The African Novel of Ideas i , for Jackson it is in universalism's erstwhile or, better, putative peripheries that the protean spirit of the novel is kept alive. More so than moving the African novel to some vanguard of literary seriousness, in I The African Novel of Ideas i Jackson meets it there. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines how certain works of global fiction have conceived of their ethical and political agency through the form and act of gathering. Discussions of the global novel's relationship to collective life have often adapted the ideas of Benedict Anderson in order to suggest that contemporary fiction extends "imagined community" from the nation to the globe. Yet political theorists such asWendy Brown have shown howglobal economic integration under neoliberalism comes at the price of national social disintegration. In search of a collective imaginary outside the terms of global integration and nationalist resurgence, this article looks to the 1930s (rather than 1990s) as an origin point for global fiction, finding in "British"works attuned to the disintegration of the liberalworld-system amodel of fiction's agency relevant for neoliberal times. Works by Mulk Raj Anand, Virginia Woolf, and, later, Zadie Smith respond to social and political disintegration by insisting upon fiction's capacity to gather together a disparate audience; and they suggest howgatherings afford an unbounded, eventual, and non-sovereign arrangement of collective life within the ruins of global modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dave Eggers's What is the What and Zeitoun are transnational works in that their narratives detail a passage between nations and concentrate on the experiences of individuals of 'hyphenated identity'. The sequence of novels Eggers has published in the second decade of the twenty-first century mark a distinctive 'American turn' in his work which offers an alternative but complementary transnational perspective. Hologram for the King (2012), The Circle (2013), Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (2014) and Heroes of the Frontier (2016) focus on 'unhyphenated' American protagonists, and examine the United States both as a specific place and as itself typical of a nation in the globalised twenty-first century world. In their post-postmodern ethical approach to fiction and their assumption that fiction's duty is to 'make reality credible', as Philip Roth once put it, these novels are themselves typical of the values and practices of a specifically US historical category, Mark McGurl's Program Era, but also of categories of transnational fiction critics have recently described as 'global' or 'planetary'. Eggers's US quartet critiques globalisation, but is ultimately more interested in asserting the value of connections between human beings in a globalised world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the English translation and reception of a major contemporary Hungarian novel, Ádám Bodor's The Sinistra Zone. A fairly slim book, The Sinistra Zone was first published in 1992, established Bodor as a major writer and inspired a considerable amount of critical literature in Hungary. The article first gives an overview of the position of The Sinistra Zone in contemporary Hungarian literature and highlights some issues discussed by critics that are relevant for the discussion of the English translation and reception. After reviewing the American reception of the book, Orzóy examines how specific features of Bodor's prose are rendered in Paul Olchváry's English translation by discussing some translational choices and analyzing how these choices may modify possible interpretations of the novel. It is also suggested that besides the interpretive potential of the English translation, expectations towards translated novels may be a reason for the divergence of opinion between Hungarian and American reviewers and critics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ubiquitous citations of the village and the manifestation of villagers in Nigerian fiction published since about 2000. Through a close reading of Chuma Nwokolo's Diaries of a Dead African, I argue that Nwokolo's novel exemplifies the ongoing critical regionalism in Nigerian writing, a practice through which writers expand the geographical imaginaries of Nigerian fiction as well as meditate reflexively upon the circulation of Nigerian fiction within the global book-publishing industry. This critical regionalism responds to the global circulation of the Nigerian novel by drawing upon, revising, and updating the geographical imaginaries of early Nigerian novelists. Elements of the village novel as a genre and ideas of the village as a crucial iteration of African spaces are deployed to signal the interplay between the complex spaces and representational practices of emerging fiction. In sum, this article works toward the legibility of the village within contemporary writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on Britain's prestigious prize for a best annual novel, this essay argues that the Booker Prize should be understood as a complex literary system that gives rise to a generic form—the cosmopolitan global novel—even as it creates the conditions for the subversion and revision of that form. In this sense, the Booker Prize provides a model for the more general study of literary systems within the current era of late capitalism and decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]