The Limits of Cosmopolitanism ― Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature

This book examines the limits of cosmopolitanism in contemporary literature. In a world in which engagement with strangers is no longer optional, and in which the ubiquitous demands of globalization clash with resurgent localist and nationalist sentiments, cosmopolitanism is no longer merely a horizon-broadening aspiration but a compulsory order of things to which we are all conscripted. Focusing on literary texts from such diverse locales as England, Algeria, Sweden, former Yugoslavia, and the Sudan, the essays in this collection interrogate the tensions and impasses in our prison-house of cosmopolitanism.

Aleksandar Stevic is an assistant professor of English at Qatar University and has previously taught at the University of Belgrade, Hampshire College, and King’s College, Cambridge. His essays on nineteenth and twentieth-century fiction have appeared in such venues as Comparative Literature Studies, Dickens Studies Annual, Victorian Literature and Culture, and the Journal of Modern Literature. He is a contributor to A History of Modern French Literature (Princeton UP, 2017), and a translator of several books from English into Serbo-Croatian, including, most recently, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.

Philip Tsang is assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati. He specializes in twentieth-century British and Anglophone literature. He is currently working on a book manuscript titled "The Obsolete Empire: Untimely Belonging in Twentieth-Century British Literature," which explores the paradoxes of communal imagination in the work of Henry James, James Joyce, Doris Lessing, and V. S. Naipaul. His articles have appeared or are forthcoming in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Twentieth-Century Literature, and The Henry James Review.