The Anglophone Novel in the Twenty-First Century

Nadia Butt, Alexander Scherr, Ansgar Nünning (Eds.)

The Anglophone Novel in the Twenty-First Century. Cultural Contexts – Literary Developments – Model Interpretations

ISBN 978-3-98940-002-3, 300 pp., paperback, € 35,00 (2023)

(WVT-Handbücher zum literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlichen Studium, Vol. 25)

In an age pervaded by global crises and planetary concerns, the Anglophone novel is undergoing significant transformations – as are the theoretical vantage points from which literary scholars study literature. This handbook aims to establish a decidedly transnational and global perspective on the contemporary novel in English. In addition to offering frameworks for theorising Anglophone literature (postcolonial studies, world literary studies, new sociological approaches, and more), it surveys (trans)cultural contexts of Anglophone fiction, literary responses to global concerns, and new novelistic forms as well as transformations of established genres.

Addressing students, professors, and literary scholars alike, the volume explores the following key questions: What are the dominant themes and topics of 21st-century Anglophone novels? Which cultural dynamics have impacted the development of Anglophone fiction, roughly over the past two decades? How can we link these developments to the genre of the novel with its European legacies? What authors – from all parts of the globe – have shaped the Anglophone literary field? Which works are among the most significant novels of the new millennium so far, and how have they altered and propelled our very notion of ‘the Anglophone novel’? What new forms of the novel have emerged in recent years, and how have established genres been transformed to negotiate transnational concerns? How can we read contemporary novels as articulations of both local and global narratives? Providing multifaceted answers to these and several other questions, the chapters in this handbook offer different models for investigating the contemporary Anglophone novel on a transnational plane.

Preview / Table of Contents (pdf)

Review

"The unresolved challenge of Rushdie's bitter diagnosis persists to the present day: can the anglophone ever be anything more than the postcolonial remains of a field from which the British and American have been conceptually subtracted? For those readers who – like the present reviewer – believe that it not only can, but indeed must if the disciplinary practice of a language-oriented philology is to have a sustainable future in the rapidly changing world of the 21st-century humanities, the volume under review offers a fine overview not only of the manifold and often enough widely divergent thematic, social, and aesthetic trajectories of the 21st-century anglophone novel, but also of major theoretical approaches and methodological pathways currently pursued to critically come to terms with it. The volume under review may not yet provide the final answers to how 'all English Literatures could be studied together,' but it certainly goes a long way towards moving anglophone studies out of an appendix status and decentering our understanding of 'Eng. Lit.' worldwide – and can thus be thoroughly recommended to anyone interested in the manifold forms and functions of the anglophone in an increasingly transcultural and transnational world."

Frank Schulze-Engler, Anglistik – International Journal of English Studies 35.2 (2024)