Literature After Globalization

Reviews / Votes

Elegant, challenging and ambitious, Leonard's Literature after Globalization reads contemporary fiction in terms that ask broad questions about citizenship and national identity in the context of the messy fluidity and flux of our networked world. In the process, he generate a range of important insights into the nature of readership, identity and statehood at the start of the 21st century. -- James Annesley, Senior Lecturer in American Literature Literature After Globalization is no doubt a thought-provoking study. -- Alison Gibbons * American Book Review * LeoNard (Nottingham Trent Univ., UK) offers six chapters on five novels of globalization. He writes on Anglo-Indian Indra Sinha's The Cyber Gypsies (1999), a barely fictional memoir of the emergence of early multi-participant online communities. He explores Cryptonomicon (1999), one of the best works of the talented Neal Stephenson, in which the encryption of vast amounts of data is an active theme. Leonard offers perspicacious readings of the Anglo-Indian Hari Kunzru's compelling Transmission (2004), which has a hacker as its protagonist, and of Mark Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), arguably not a novel but rather a multi-stranded 360-page meditation on open-ended constuctions of self from fragments of existing culture. A suggestive reading of the film Starship Troopers (1997), based on Robert Heinlein's 1959 book of the same title, is also offered. Leonard's cumulative representation of interfaces between contemporary literature and the digital domain is even more valuable than these fine readings, as are his rapid yet learned and subtle comments on the work of major theorists. This is a rare achievement in the field of literature and globalization, a definite advance on even such competent works as James Annesley's Fictions of Globalization (2006) and Suman Gupta's Globalization and Literature (CH, Oct'09, 47-0689). Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty. -- K.Toeloelyan, Wesleyan University, USA * CHOICE *