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This book is a concise and engaging analysis of contemporary literature viewed through the critical lens of cosmopolitan theory. It covers a wide spectrum of issues including globalisation, cosmopolitanism, nationhood, identity, philosophical nomadism, posthumanism, climate change, devolution and love.
This book visits contemporary British children’s and young adult (YA) fiction alongside cosmopolitanism, exploring the notion of the nation within the context of globalization, transnationalism and citizenship. By resisting globalization’s dehumanizing conflation, cosmopolitanism offers an ethical, humanitarian, and political outlook of convivial planetary community. In its pedagogical responsibility towards readers who will become future citizens, contemporary children’s and YA fiction seeks to interrogate and dismantle modes of difference and instead provide aspirational models of empathetic world citizenship. McCulloch discusses texts such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jackie Kay’s Strawgirl, Theresa Breslin’s Divided City, Gillian Cross’s Where I Belong, Kerry Drewery’s A Brighter Fear, Saci Lloyd’s Momentum, and Julie Bertagna’s Exodus trilogy. This book addresses ways in which children’s and YA fiction imagines not only the nation but the world beyond, seeking to disrupt binary divisions through a cosmopolitical outlook. The writers discussed envision British society’s position and role within a global arena of wide-ranging topical issues, including global conflicts, gender, racial politics, ecology, and climate change. Contemporary children’s fiction has matured by depicting characters who face uncertainty just as the world itself experiences an uncertain future of global risks, such as environmental threats and terrorism. The volume will be of significant interest to the fields of children’s literature, YA fiction, contemporary fiction, cosmopolitanism, ecofeminism, gender theory, and British and Scottish literature.
This book visits contemporary British children’s and young adult (YA) fiction alongside cosmopolitanism, exploring the notion of the nation within the context of globalization, transnationalism and citizenship. By resisting globalization’s dehumanizing conflation, cosmopolitanism offers an ethical, humanitarian, and political outlook of convivial planetary community. In its pedagogical responsibility towards readers who will become future citizens, contemporary children’s and YA fiction seeks to interrogate and dismantle modes of difference and instead provide aspirational models of empathetic world citizenship. McCulloch discusses texts such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Jackie Kay’s Strawgirl, Theresa Breslin’s Divided City, Gillian Cross’s Where I Belong, Kerry Drewery’s A Brighter Fear, Saci Lloyd’s Momentum, and Julie Bertagna’s Exodus trilogy. This book addresses ways in which children’s and YA fiction imagines not only the nation but the world beyond, seeking to disrupt binary divisions through a cosmopolitical outlook. The writers discussed envision British society’s position and role within a global arena of wide-ranging topical issues, including global conflicts, gender, racial politics, ecology, and climate change. Contemporary children’s fiction has matured by depicting characters who face uncertainty just as the world itself experiences an uncertain future of global risks, such as environmental threats and terrorism. The volume will be of significant interest to the fields of children’s literature, YA fiction, contemporary fiction, cosmopolitanism, ecofeminism, gender theory, and British and Scottish literature.
“Cosmopolitanism contains some of the most polished and enviably well-written chapters of literary criticism that have ever come my way. Shaw’s readings are critically informed and theoretically sophisticated, yet at the same time remarkably lucid and clear. This is a work of very fine, well-balanced, and – for a first book – astonishingly mature scholarship.” — Prof Berthold Schoene, Head of Research and Knowledge Exchange, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK “The first study to fully appreciate contemporary literature's engagement with cosmopolitanism. A persuasive and articulate engagement with questions of ethics, community, transnationalism and cultural identity, it's an essential read for anyone interested in the contribution of contemporary fiction to our world today”. — Dr Sara Upstone, Principal Lecturer in English Literature, Kingston University, UK. This study of cosmopolitanism in contemporary British and American fiction identifies several authors who forge new and intensified dialogues between local experience and global flows. The twenty-first century has been marked by an unprecedented intensification in globalisation, transnational mobility and technological change. The theories and values of cosmopolitanism will be argued to provide a direct response to ways of being-in-relation to others and answer urgent fears surrounding cultural convergence. The four chapters examine works by David Mitchell, Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Dave Eggers and Hari Kunzru. The study will demonstrate how these authors imagine new cosmopolitan modes of belonging and point towards the need for an emergent and affirmative cosmopolitics attuned to the diversity and complexity of twenty-first century globality. The study assumes an interdisciplinary approach and will appeal to literature academics, under-/ postgraduate students, and researchers interested in the culture and politics of contemporary life.
How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during the 2000s shape contemporary British fiction? The means of publishing, buying and reading fiction changed dramatically between 2000 and 2010. This volume explores how the socio-political and economic turns of the decade, bookended by the beginning of a millennium and an economic crisis, transformed the act of writing and reading. Through consideration of, among other things, the treatment of neuroscience, violence, the historical and youth subcultures in recent fiction, the essays in this collection explore the complex and still powerful relation between the novel and the world in which it is written, published and read. This major literary assessment of the fiction of the 2000s covers the work of newer voices such as Monica Ali, Mark Haddon, Tom McCarthy, David Peace and Zadie Smith as well as those more established, such as Salman Rushdie, Hilary Mantel and Ian McEwan making it an essential contribution to reading, defining and understanding the decade.
Throughout contemporary British writing, the question of national identity recurs. By means of its testimony to lived experience, the novel seems to offer the possibility of exploring local communities and marginalized identities in various elaborate ways. However, by its very metropolitanism, and as a result of the material circumstances of publishing and the cosmopolitan nature of the audience, the British novel inevitably conglomerates around London, and its exploration of the remainder of Britain has tended to be patchy and touristy.
While traditionally the novel has been seen as tracking the development of the nation state, Schoene queries if globalisation might currently be prompting the emergence of a new sub-genre of the novel that is adept at imagining global community. The book introduces a new generation of contemporary British writers (Rachel Cusk, Kiran Desai, Hari Kunzru, Jon McGregor and David Mitchell) whose work is read against that of established novelists Arundhati Roy, James Kelman and Ian McEwan. Each chapter explores a different theoretical key concept, including 'glocality', 'glomicity', 'tour du monde', 'connectivity' and 'compearance'. Key Features:* Defines the new genre of the 'cosmopolitan novel' by reading contemporary British fiction as responsive to new global socio-economic formations* Expands knowledge of world culture, national identity, literary creativity and political agency by introducing concepts from globalisation and cosmopolitan theory into literary studies * Explores debates on Britishness and 'the contemporary' with close reference to the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9/11/1989 and the World Trade Centre attacks on 11/9/2001 * Introduces a new generation of British writers within a complex global context by drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's work on community and creative world-formation
This book investigates how culture and economics define novel forms of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan fiction. Tracing cosmopolitanism’s transition from universalism to vernacularism, the book opens up new avenues for reading cosmopolitan fiction by offering a precise and convenient set of terminology. The figure of the cosmoflâneur identifies a contemporary cosmopolitan character’s urban mobility and wandering consciousness in interaction with the global and the local. Posthuman cosmopolitanism also extends the meaning of cosmopolitan which comes to embrace the nonhuman alongside the human element. Defining narrative glocality, political hyper-awareness, and narrative immediacy, the book thoroughly explores how cosmopolitan narration forges direct responses to the contemporary world in postmillennial cosmopolitan novels. All of these concepts are elaborated in Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Zadie Smith’s NW (2012), Salman Rushdie’s The Golden House (2017), and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (2021), to which world-engagement is central.
This book examines how the transcultural and transnational migration of people, texts, and ideas has transformed the paradigm of national literature, with Britain and Ireland as case studies. The study questions definitions of migration and migrant literature that focus solely on the work of authors with migrant backgrounds, and suggests that migration is not extraneous but intrinsic to contemporary understandings of national literature in a global context. The fictional work of authors such as Caryl Phillips, Colum McCann, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Rose Tremain, Elif Shafak, and Evelyn Conlon is analysed from a variety of perspectives, including transculturality, cosmopolitanism, and Afropolitanism, so as to emphasise how their work fosters an understanding of national literature, as well as of individual and collective identities, based on transborder interconnectivity.
In Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism and the Politics of Community, first published in 2001, Jessica Berman argues that the fiction of Henry James, Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein engages directly with early twentieth-century transformations of community and cosmopolitanism. Although these modernist writers develop radically different models for social organization, their writings return again and again to issues of commonality, shared voice, and exchange of experience, particularly in relation to dominant discourses of gender and nationality. The writings of James, Proust, Woolf and Stein, she argues, not only inscribe early twentieth-century anxieties about race, ethnicity, nationality and gender, but confront them with demands for modern, cosmopolitan versions of community. This study seeks to revise theories of community and cosmopolitanism in light of their construction in narrative, and in particular it seeks to reveal the ways that modernist fiction can provide meaningful alternative models of community.
