Description

In a series of interrelated essays, this book explores the form and content of significant and representative examples of Anglo-American fiction set in France and published between 1996 and 2004, as well as the context and meaning of their current importance. The work of Diane Johnson, Rose Tremain, Joanne Harris, Claire Messud, Sarah Smith, and Edmund White, among others, provides a framework for the consideration of the emergence of a specifically literary counterpart to a process of globalization usually seen as exclusively economic and political. The novels studied reveal a set of diverse but related textual strategies and thematic interests that identify certain aspects of postmodern writing as characteristic both of contemporary English-language novels set in France and of a new literary globalism. Together, the essays reveal the profound changes that the international novel of Henry James has undergone in a globalized world of altered Franco-American cultural relations.