Imagination and the Contemporary Novel [Paperback]

A comparative study of the imagination in literature from the Anglophone world.John Su explores literary responses from across the Anglophone world to the profound economic, social and political shifts that have occurred since the end of the Cold War. Broadly comparative in scope, this study uses examples from the United States, Great Britain, Africa and Southeast Asia.John Su explores literary responses from across the Anglophone world to the profound economic, social and political shifts that have occurred since the end of the Cold War. Broadly comparative in scope, this study uses examples from the United States, Great Britain, Africa and Southeast Asia.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, Andr? 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.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 postlSv