Globalization and Contemporary Literature

Abstract

This essay provides an overview of recent debates over economic globalization and explores globalization's effects on and implications for contemporary literature. The era of globalization is typically defined as a time in which the sovereignty of nation states has declined and modes of exchange operate with increasing ease and speed across national boundaries, producing configurations of power that exceed the boundaries of the nation-state. It is said to have been “born” with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the subsequent end of the Cold War. But this essay also considers ways in which globalization is linked to the broader history of modernity and to the inequalities produced and reproduced in capitalism and colonialism. It further suggests that globalization's impact on literature is manifold, with both positive and negative associations. The publishing industry has itself become more globalized (and consolidated into multinational media conglomerates), but the World Wide Web simultaneously allows ever greater access to literary texts. Meanwhile, the themes of hybridity and multi-rootedness – in part, expressions of the subjective experience of globalization – are increasingly prevalent in literary texts. The essay concludes by exploring the question of how globalization might be shaping new literary forms, and suggests that contemporary literary theory and criticism must distinguish globalization from postmodernism.