This book argues that contemporary world literature is defined by peripheral internationalism. Over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a range of aesthetic forms beyond the metropolitan West - fiction, memoir, cinema, theater - came to resist cultural nationalism and promote the struggles of subaltern groups. Peripheral internationalism pitted intellectuals and writers not only against the ex-imperial West, but also against their burgeoning national elites. In a sense, these writers...

Crossing Borders is a gathering of twenty original, interdisciplinary essays on the paradigm of borders in African American literature, multi-ethnic U.S. studies, and South Asian studies. These essays by established and mid-career scholars from around the globe employ a variety of approaches to the idea of “border crossings” and represent important contributions to the discourses on modernity, diasporic mobility, populism, migration, exile, sub-nation, trans-nation, as well as the formatio...

The volume outlines modern British literature's relation to global empire from the 16th century to the present. Spanning the interactions between Britain, Europe, and the world outside, in Asia, Africa, Australasia, North America, and the Caribbean, it suggests the centrality of colonial-capitalist empire and global exchanges in the development of major genres of literary fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction. Illuminating the vital role of categories such as race, class, gender, religio...