Translocality in Contemporary City Novels
Authors: Mattheis, Lena
- 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
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- About this book
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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.
- About the authors
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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.
- Reviews
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“Lena Mattheis offers an exciting and timely theoretical intervention in how we read and understand the translocal in contemporary writing. This is fascinating and insightful work.” (Anne-Marie Evans, Associate Head of School: English Literature, York St John University, UK)
Bibliographic Information
- Bibliographic Information
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- Book Title
- Translocality in Contemporary City Novels
- Authors
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- Lena Mattheis
- Series Title
- Literary Urban Studies
- Copyright
- 2021
- Publisher
- Palgrave Macmillan
- Copyright Holder
- The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
- eBook ISBN
- 978-3-030-66687-3
- DOI
- 10.1007/978-3-030-66687-3
- Hardcover ISBN
- 978-3-030-66686-6
- Series ISSN
- 2523-7888
- Edition Number
- 1
- Number of Pages
- XV, 247
- Number of Illustrations
- 12 b/w illustrations
- Topics
