Is There a Booker Aesthetic? Iterations of the Global Novel.

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]