EWL 359 Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
In this course, we will read English-language novels written in non-English cultural contexts, including Nigeria, South Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Australia. We will consider why authors from these various regions chose to write in English, and examine the particular national contexts from which the texts emerged, as well as the broader questions of readership and distribution in an era of globalized publishing and reading markets. The European novel emerged in conjunction with ideas of national identity (“the English novel,” “the German novel,” “the Great American Novel”); contemporary Anglophone fiction complicates these notions, inviting us to consider what it means to be writing fiction in English in the twenty-first century.