Description
Book SynopsisHow contemporary novels use narrative time to counter cultural homogenization and historical flattening. In From Empire to Anthropocene, Betty Joseph celebrates how contemporary fiction contributes to a novel framing of world literature by playing with our understanding of time. Bringing together an unusual constellation of writersincluding Jamaica Kincaid, Teju Cole, Hari Kunzru, and Barbara KingsolverJoseph traces how the novelistic interplay of concrete and abstract temporalities offers a new theory of critical globality. Joseph examines time in contemporary life through five conceptual metaphors that have captivated literary, critical, and cultural studies: specters, attachments, networks, markets, and assemblages. Joseph demonstrates how these terms are embedded with their own temporal structures and linguistic complexity. She develops a mode of reading that she calls conceptual-metaphorical performances, which embody the writers' complex chronopolitical commitments and their re
