Translocality in Contemporary City Novels

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.

Auteur

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.