Literature of the Global Age

In an age of world citizenship, literary scholarship is focusing increasingly on texts which communicate effectively over cultural lines. Advocating a planetary approach to contemporary literature, this critical text examines eight novels from eight cultures. The writers discussed are Julian Barnes, Magda Szabo, Abraham B. Yehoshua, Ian McEwan, W.G. Sebald, Murakami Haruki, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Azar Nafisi. Focusing on the authors' encouragement to meditate on life's most pressing issues, the essays here invite us to reevaluate postmodernism as a current category.

Maurizio Ascari is a senior lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bologna. He has published broadly on crime fiction, the process of canon formation, world literature and travel writing.