1st Edition

Cosmopolitan Fictions Ethics, Politics, and Global Change in the Works of Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Jamaica Kincaid, and J. M. Coetzee

By Katherine Stanton Copyright 2006
    112 Pages
    by Routledge

    114 Pages
    by Routledge

    Participating in the reframing of literary studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions identifies, as "cosmopolitan fiction", a genre of global literature that investigates the ethics and politics of complex and multiple belonging.

    The fictions studied by Katherine Stanton represent and revise the global histories of the past and present, including the "indigenous or native" narratives that are, in Homi Bhabha's words, "internal to" national identity itself.

    The works take as their subjects:

    * European unification
    * the human rights movement
    * the AIDS epidemic
    * the new South Africa.

    And they test the infinite demands for justice against the shifting borders of the nation, rethinking habits of feeling, modes of belonging and practices of citizenship for the global future.

    Scholars, teachers and students of global literary and cultural studies, Cosmopolitan Fictions is a book to want on your reading list.

    Acknowledgements  Introduction: Contemporary Cosmopolitan Fictions  1. Foreign Feelin: Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and the New Europe  2. Criminal Justice in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost  3. Ethical Ennui and the AIDS Epidemic in Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother  4. "History is Larger than Goodwill": Restitution and Redeistributive Justice in J.M Coetzee's Age of Iron and Disgrace  Afterword: "To Touch the Future on its Hither Side"  Notes  Bibliography  Index

    Biography

    Katherine Stanton