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Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

Imagination and the Contemporary Novel

John J. Su, Marquette University, Wisconsin
December 2013
Available
Paperback
9781107645974

    Imagination and the Contemporary Novel examines the global preoccupation with the imagination among literary authors with ties to former colonies of the British Empire since the 1960s. John Su draws on a wide range of authors including Peter Ackroyd, Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, John Fowles, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith. This study rehabilitates the category of imagination in order to understand a broad range of contemporary Anglophone literature. The responses of such literature to shifts in global capitalism have often been misunderstood by the dominant categories of literary studies, the postmodern and the postcolonial. As both an insightful critique into the themes that drive a range of today's best novelists and a bold restatement of what the imagination is and what it means for contemporary culture, this book breaks new ground in the study of twenty-first-century literature.

    • Broad comparative focus, bringing together a wide variety of Anglophone literatures from across the world
    • Detailed readings of Monica Ali, Julian Barnes, André Brink, J. M. Coetzee, Amitav Ghosh, Nadine Gordimer, Hanif Kureishi, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith
    • Finds common themes in Anglophone writing that transcend the categories of postmodern or postcolonial literature

    Reviews & endorsements

    "Imagination and the Contemporary Novel makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the role of imagination in contemporary fiction..."
    -Contemporary Literature

    See more reviews

    Product details

    December 2013
    Paperback
    9781107645974
    230 pages
    229 × 152 × 12 mm
    0.31kg
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Introduction: globalization, imagination, and the novel
    • 2. Aesthetic revolutions: white South African writing and the state of emergency
    • 3. The pastoral and the postmodern
    • 4. Hybridity, enterprise culture, and the fiction of multicultural Britain
    • 5. Ghosts of essentialism: racial memory as epistemological claim
    • 6. Amitav Ghosh and the aesthetic turn in postcolonial studies
    • Conclusion
    • Works cited.
      Author
    • John J. Su , Marquette University, Wisconsin

      John J. Su is Associate Professor of English at Marquette University.