The world novel, distant suffering and humanitarian sensibility after 1989. As war and terror flicker across our televisions, writers like Rushdie, McEwan and Hosseini have turned the novel into a global form, expressing a new humanitarian ethic. This project explores the makings of these World Novels across sites of ongoing global conflict, and traces their plea for sympathy back to the novel's beginnings, in the eighteenth-century.
Transnational Coetzee: Revisioning World Literature through the Margins. The reputation of J. M. Coetzee has undergone a dramatic global upsurge in the past 15 years, coinciding with his relocation to Australia and subsequent adoption of citizenship in 2002. This project aims to explore the proposition that the writings of the South African-born Coetzee possess profound and abiding transnational qualities, and then map the global shifts that this work has undergone in the new century. By examin ....Transnational Coetzee: Revisioning World Literature through the Margins. The reputation of J. M. Coetzee has undergone a dramatic global upsurge in the past 15 years, coinciding with his relocation to Australia and subsequent adoption of citizenship in 2002. This project aims to explore the proposition that the writings of the South African-born Coetzee possess profound and abiding transnational qualities, and then map the global shifts that this work has undergone in the new century. By examining these aspects through Coetzee's position in his adopted country, the project seeks to re-examine notions of Australian nationality and the parameters of its literary, cultural and political identity, moving them beyond an insular, border-defined understanding towards a wider international frame.Read moreRead less