From one of America’s most exciting historians, the astonishing life and times of Joseph Conrad, a visionary guide to the turbulent age of globalization Immigration, terrorism, the danger
“Enlightening, compassionate, superb” —John Le CarréA New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017One of the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2017A visionary exploration of the li
This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century - including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad - explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism - the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world - to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.
This book tells a story about the transformation of mid-Victorian urban writing in response both to London's growing size and diversity, and Britain's shifting global fortunes. Tanya Agathocleous departs from customary understandings of realism, modernism, and the transition between them, to show how a range of writers throughout the nineteenth century - including William Wordsworth, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad - explored the ethical, social and political implications of globalization. Showcasing a variety of different genres, Agathocleous uses the lens of cosmopolitan realism - the literary techniques used to transform the city into an image of the world - to explain how texts that seem glaringly dissimilar actually emerged from the same historical concept, and in doing so presents startlingly new ways of thinking about the meaning and effect of cosmopolitanism.
Literary fiction is a powerful cultural tool for criticizing governments and for imagining how better governance and better states would work. Combining political theory with strong readings of a vast range of novels, John Marx shows that fiction over the long twentieth century has often envisioned good government not in Utopian but in pragmatic terms. Early-twentieth-century novels by Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster and Rabindrananth Tagore helped forecast world government after European imperialism. Twenty-first-century novelists such as Monica Ali, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje and Amitav Ghosh have inherited that legacy and continue to criticize existing policies in order to formulate best practices on a global scale. Marx shows how literature can make an important contribution to political and social sciences by creating a space to imagine and experiment with social organization.
