Overview
- Innovatively critiques dominant approaches to literary and cultural history
- Provides a study that is truly international in scope
- Has interdisciplinary appeal to historians and cultural theorists
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature (NCWL)
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About this book
This book attempts to understand what ‘contemporary’ has meant, and should mean, for literary studies. The essays in this volume suggest that an attentive reading of recent global literatures challenges the idea that our contemporary moment is best characterized as a timeless, instantaneous ‘now’. The contributors to this book argue that global literatures help us to conceive of the contemporary as an always plural, heterogeneous, and contested temporality. Far from suggesting that we replace theories of an omnipresent ‘end of history’ with a traditional, single, diachronic timeline, this book encourages the development of such a timeline’s rigorous inverse: a synchronic, multi-faceted and multi-temporal history of the contemporary in literature, and thus of contemporary global literatures. It opens up the concept of the contemporary for comparative study by unlocking its temporal, logical, political, and ultimately aesthetic and literary complexity.
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Keywords
Table of contents (10 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Reviews
“It’s well past time that someone took a comparative approach to the study of contemporary literature. Taking deep dives into work from Latin America and Africa as well as England and the United States, and challenging a notion of the contemporary as dominated by the homogenizing time of capitalism, the contributors to this volume explore the multiple temporalities central to recent writing. In their indispensable account, a complex and layered notion of time becomes not only the formal hallmark of contemporary literature but also the means by which it re-opens the possibility of imagining new, collectively determined futures.” (Professor Andrew Hoberek, Department of English, University of Missouri, USA)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Sarah Brouillette is Professor of English at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (2007) and Literature and the Creative Economy (2014).
Mathias Nilges is Associate Professor of English at St. Francis Xavier University, Canada. He has co-edited the books Literary Materialisms (2013), Marxism and the Critique of Value (2014), and The Contemporaneity of Modernism (2016). He has published on twentieth and twenty-first century American literature, critical theory, and literary history.
Emilio Sauri is Associate Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. His research focuses on literature and visual art from the United States and Latin America, particularly in relation to the development of the global economy from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Literature and the Global Contemporary
Editors: Sarah Brouillette, Mathias Nilges, Emilio Sauri
Series Title: New Comparisons in World Literature
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63055-7
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-63054-0Published: 16 November 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-87464-7Published: 24 August 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-63055-7Published: 03 November 2017
Series ISSN: 2634-6095
Series E-ISSN: 2634-6109
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXXVIII, 201
Topics: Comparative Literature, Contemporary Literature, Postcolonial/World Literature