The Transnational in English Literature by K. Nayar, Pramod;

Short description:

Transnational English Literature examines English literary history through its transnational engagements and argues that every period of English Literature can be characterised through its global relations. English identity and nationhood is therefore defined through its negotiation with other regions and cultures.

Long description:

The Transnational in English Literature examines English literary history through its transnational engagements and argues that every period of English Literature can be examined through its global relations. English identity and nationhood is therefore defined through its negotiation with other regions and cultures.

The first book to look at the entirety of English literature through a transnational lens, Pramod Nayar:

• Maps the discourses that constitute the global in every age, from the Early Modern to the twentieth century


• Offers readings of representative texts in poetry, fiction, essay and drama, covering a variety of genres such as Early Modern tragedy, the adventure novel, the narrative poem, Gothic and utopian fiction


• Examines major authors including Shakespeare, Defoe, Behn, Swift, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Austen, Mary Shelley, the Brontës, Doyle, Ballantyne, Orwell, Conrad, Kipling, Forster


• Looks at themes such as travel and discovery, exoticism, mercantilism, commodities, the civilisational mission and the multiculturalization of England.

Useful for students and academics alike this book offers a comprehensive survey of the English canon questioning and analysing the transnational and global engagements of English literature.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction: Globality and Englishness  2. Worlds and Voyages: English Itinerancy and the Spaces of Otherness  3. Desire and Danger: The Exoticized Other  4. Consume and Commodify: The Objectified Other  5. Disease and Degeneration: The Pathologized Other  6. Civilize and Collapse: Improveable Others, Disintegrating English