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Cover image of From Empire to Anthropocene
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From Empire to Anthropocene

The Novel in Posthistorical Times

Betty Joseph

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How contemporary novels use narrative time to counter cultural homogenization and historical flattening.

In From Empire to Anthropocene, Betty Joseph celebrates how contemporary fiction contributes to a novel framing of world literature by playing with our understanding of time. Bringing together an unusual constellation of writers—including Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, and Barbara Kingsolver—Joseph traces how the novelistic interplay of concrete and abstract temporalities offers a new theory of critical globality.

Joseph examines time in contemporary life through five conceptual...

How contemporary novels use narrative time to counter cultural homogenization and historical flattening.

In From Empire to Anthropocene, Betty Joseph celebrates how contemporary fiction contributes to a novel framing of world literature by playing with our understanding of time. Bringing together an unusual constellation of writers—including Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, and Barbara Kingsolver—Joseph traces how the novelistic interplay of concrete and abstract temporalities offers a new theory of critical globality.

Joseph examines time in contemporary life through five conceptual metaphors that have captivated literary, critical, and cultural studies: specters, attachments, networks, markets, and assemblages. Joseph demonstrates how these terms are embedded with their own temporal structures and linguistic complexity. She develops a mode of reading that she calls "conceptual-metaphorical performances," which embody the writers' complex chronopolitical commitments and their refusal to concede to the political paralysis implied in the synchronous and flattened world-time of globality. Time, rather than space, is the axis along which contemporary fiction challenges us to imagine forms of coexistence and social collectivity under the precarious conditions of global capitalism and environmental damage.

From Empire to Anthropocene convincingly dispels the notion that so-called English-language "world literature" precludes the possibility of historical analysis and social collectivity. Bringing postcolonialism and Marxist theory into conversation with critical global and ecological perspectives, this book paves the way for a new literary theorization of contemporary Anglophone literature and contributes a fresh perspective to the field of cultural studies.

Reviews

Reviews

What a fantastic, smart, eloquent, and incisive book! The introduction, with its brilliant exposition of the stakes of contemporariness, of the historical sequences and patterns that have produced our ongoing and seemingly endless present, is alone worth the price of admission. But you will read on: the pleasure and the force of Joseph's unyielding mind grounds every reading in every chapter of this wonderful work.

An admirably capacious analysis of the contemporary literature of globalization and climate change, Joseph's book speaks powerfully to the capacity of narrative fiction to give form to questions of history, capitalism, technology, and planetary belonging. Her focus on the ethico-political work of rhetoric and syntax is a model for postcolonial scholars.

Offering an electrifying account of the multiple temporalities instituted by global modernity, Betty Joseph shows how the resources of the novel give shape to time in the face of the unprecedented historical, affective, technological, economic, and environmental changes wrought by globalization. From Empire to Anthropocene is a powerful and timely account of the ways our capacity to grasp the abstract forces governing our interconnected world depend upon literary figures and narrative forms.

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Book Details

Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
6
x
9
Pages
248
ISBN
9781421446981
Illustration Description
1 b&w illus
Author Bio
Betty Joseph
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Betty Joseph

Betty Joseph (HOUSTON, TX) is a professor in the Department of English at Rice University. She is the author of Reading the East India Company, 1720-1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender.