Literary globalism

the long version

"In a series of interrelated essays on significant and representative examples of such books, Literary Globalism: Anglo-American Fiction Set in France explores their form and content as well as the context and meaning of their current importance. The work of Diane Johnson, Rose Tremain, Joanne Harris, Claire Messud, Sarah Smith, and Edmund White, among others, provides a framework for the consideration of the emergence of a specifically literary counterpart to a process of globalization usually seen as exclusively economic and political. The novels studied reveal a set of diverse but related textual strategies and thematic interests that identify certain aspects of postmodern writing as characteristic both of contemporary English-language novels set in France and of a new literary globalism." "Johnson's Le Divorce and Le Mariage allow for a consideration of the profound changes that the international novel of Henry James has undergone in a globalized world of altered Franco-American cultural relations. Tremain's The Way I Found Her illustrates the use of cultural borrowing to create an international corpus of texts and a cosmopolitan community of readers. Harris's Chocolat and Blackberry Wine reveal her metaphoric use of the space of provincial France to represent postmodernity as a world of mobility and rootlessness. Messud's The Last Life, White's The Married Man, and Smith's historical trilogy all qualify as traveling novels, which foreground the constructed nature of national identity and juxtapose portraits of America and France to explore the meaning of expatriation in a postmodern world." "Taken together, the essays in Literary Globalism suggest that in the early twenty-first century, even mainstream English-language fiction can no longer be contained within conventional boundaries, whether narrative, national, or even linguistic, as English becomes the international language of a culturally unified Europe, and Anglo-Americans increasingly experience the foreign primarily through their own language and literature."--Jacket.