Contemporary World Narrative Fiction and the Spaces of Neoliberalism

This book is a transnational study of how contemporary fiction writers from the United States and Canada to Nigeria to India to Dubai have conceptualized the emergent social spaces of the diverse corners of the neoliberal world system. Over the span of the past three to four decades, free market economic policies have been sold to or pushed upon every society on the globe in some way, shape, or form. The upshot of this has been a world system structured in terms of a vast shift of power and resources from government to private enterprise, dwindling civic life replaced by rising consumerism, an emerging oligarchic rentier class, large segments of population faced with meager material conditions of existence and few prospects of socio-economic mobility, and a looming sense of a near future dominated by further economic collapses and mounting social strife. This book analyses a wide cultural array of some of the most poignant narrative engagements with neoliberalism in its various localized manifestations throughout the world.

Michael K. Walonen is Assistant Professor of English at Bethune-Cookman University, USA. He specializes in transatlantic modern and contemporary cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and world literature. He is the author of the book Writing Tangier in the Postcolonial Transition: Space and Power in Expatriate and North African Literature and articles that have appeared in the journals Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, Studies in Travel Writing, African Literature and Culture, and Frontiers: The International Journal of Study Abroad, as well as the collections Geocritical Explorations and On and Off the Page: Mapping in Text and Culture.