Genre and nation IN THE CONTEMPORARY NOVEL: remapping the literary landscape after globalisation

Abstract

The accelerated processes of globalisation, along with time-space compression and the arrival of the information age, mark our entry into what Robert Hassan calls the chronoscopic society. This is a society dominated by the instantaneous transmission of information and media, a networked culture that destabilises the former structures of imagined community such as the nation. The contemporary novel has responded to the chronoscopic society by reasserting its importance as a site in which the ambivalences generated by modernity can be documented and appraised. This response both absorbs and goes beyond the levels of the national, the international and even the global, towards a conceptual framework that has been theorised as the planetary. This thesis explores the ways in which certain contemporary novels provide a critique of the totalising nature of our period of late capitalism. The four works closely examined here are representative of the wider trends in which the literary novel absorbs and reworks the conventions of genre fiction. I argue that this contemporary utilisation of genre shows a development from postmodernist poetics, because these novelists are concerned not with the hybridisation of genres and bringing marginal concerns into the mainstream, but rather with providing a critique of the amorphous form of liquid modernity, which is the most visible signifier of late capitalism. Accordingly, I analyse the role of the gothic in Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas, magical realism in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, the historical novel in English Passengers by Matthew Kneale, and, finally, Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, which incorporates six distinct genres. These four writers employ specific genres as a stabilising framework, which allows them to acknowledge aspects of life as yet untouched by the otherwise-totalising forces of capitalism. They show how traditional folklore and local cultures persist and co-exist amongst the global, planetary flows of capital, information, media and people.