Overview

Translocality in Contemporary City Novels responds to the fact that twenty-first-century Anglophone novels are increasingly characterised by translocality—the layering and blending of two or more distant settings. Considering translocal and transcultural writing as a global phenomenon, this book draws on multidisciplinary research, from globalisation theory to the study of narratives to urban studies, to explore a corpus of thirty-two novels—by authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Dionne Brand, Kiran Desai, and Xiaolu Guo—set in a total of ninety-seven cities. Lena Mattheis examines six of the most common strategies used in contemporary urban fiction to make translocal experiences of the world narratable and turn them into relatable stories: simultaneity, palimpsests, mapping, scaling, non-places, and haunting. Combining and developing further theories, approaches, and techniques from a variety of research fields—including narratology, human geography, transculturality,diaspora spaces, and postcolonial perspectives—Mattheis develops a set of cross-disciplinary techniques in literary urban studies.

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9783030666897

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Mattheis's Translocality in Contemporary City Novels not only effectively identifies some main narrative devices in the extensive corpus of city novels featuring translocal space; her analysis also opens up the possibility of empirically examining different or intersectional identities in translocal writings ... . The book as well as the possible future findings reflect our lived urban experiences, which are always filled with layers as well as particularities that account for our translocal identities. (Kai Qing Tan, Anglistik, Vol. 33 (3), 2022)

Author Information

Lena Mattheis is Lecturer and Research Assistant at the University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany. Her work has been published in journals such as Narrative and Literary Geographies.

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