Overview
- Presents a general theory and application of translocality
- Studies a corpus of contemporary novels rather than examining a particular city
- Contributes to a greater understanding of narrative strategies in urban novels
Part of the book series: Literary Urban Studies (LIURS)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
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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Authors and Affiliations
About the author
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.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Translocality in Contemporary City Novels
Authors: Lena Mattheis
Series Title: Literary Urban Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66686-6Published: 20 March 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-66689-7Published: 20 March 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-66687-3Published: 19 March 2021
Series ISSN: 2523-7888
Series E-ISSN: 2523-7896
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XV, 251
Number of Illustrations: 7 b/w illustrations, 5 illustrations in colour
Topics: Literature, general, Fiction, Urban History, Cultural Studies, Urban Geography / Urbanism (inc. megacities, cities, towns)