Planetary Novels?: Cosmopolitanism and Globality In and Out of a National Literature
Planetary Novels?: Cosmopolitanism and Globality In and Out of a National Literature

Summary/Abstract: The rhetoric of ‘Globalization’ is freighted with both multiple political agendas and with counter-terms like ‘anti-globalization’, such that concepts like globality, cosmopolitanism, and the planetary often work as useful acknowledgements in literary studies of cultural passages in which national boundaries are thought beyond and sought beyond. Writing in the late 20th century, Ulrich Beck avers that “Globality means that from now on nothing which happens on our planet is only a limited local event; all inventions, victories and catastrophes affect the whole world, and we must reorient and reorganize our lives and actions, our organizations and institutions along a ‘local-global’ axis.” Corporate and social media report the major-stage events, but the reorientation of literature on a local-global axis will involve taking the ordinary-local into new loci. There may be a temptation to say that this returns literary focus to a rhetoric of universalism, diminishing the primacy of difference in lived experience, but global, cosmopolitan or planetary fiction need function not as an aesthetic representation of the universal in the local but as a fiction staged against an awareness of the interconnected world. This paper will seek to outline some of the terms and literary investments at stake in this discussion, while using for illustration examples from contemporary British fiction significant to both a national and a global literature.

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