Swallowing a world : globalization and the maximalist novel / Benjamin Bergholtz.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bergholtz, Benjamin, author.

Series:

Frontiers of narrative

Frontiers of narrative series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Fiction.

Fiction--21st century--History and criticism.

Maximalism (Literature).

Literature and globalization.

Physical Description:

xii, 233 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Lincoln : University of Nebraska Press, [2024]

Summary:

"Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though it's typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smith's White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon James's A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahman's In the Light of What We Know), and globalization's gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpell's The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgments

Introduction: Mapping the Maximalist Novel

1. Midnight's Children and the Postcolonial Cultural Industry

2. "Certainty in its Purest Form": Globalization, Fundamentalism, and Narrative in White Teeth

3. "It Shouldn't Produce No Pretty Sentence, Ever": Violence and Aesthetics in A Brief History of Seven Killings

4. The "Pursuit of Knowledge" and the Paradoxes of Postcolonial Encyclopedism in In the Light of What We Know

5. Gender, Empathy, and the Uneven Drift of Globalization in The Old Drift

Conclusion: "Different Ways of Projecting the World": The Future of Maximalist Fiction

Notes

Bibliography

Index.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781496231284

1496231287

OCLC:

1416744843