Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq’s magnum opus Leg over Leg (al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq, 1855) is perhaps the most important work of Arabic literature from the nineteenth century. It laid the foundation for modernist Arabic prose at once rooted in Arabic literature's classical forms, language, and genres and pushed them to innovative and modern critical ends. Despite al-Shidyāq’s unprecedented redirection of the forms of classical Arabic literature to modern critical ends, Leg over Leg and the roots of Arabic literary modernity and modernist prose it sprouted were systematically marginalized to the point that by the mid twentieth century they had become largely irrelevant and forgotten. This chapter outlines how twentieth-century literary critics covered up Leg over Leg’s pioneering modernist roots, elaborates the nature of al-Shidyāq’s modernism, and argues that it is still rich with potential.

The Iranian author Ṣādiq Hidāyat (usually anglicized as Sadegh Hedayat; 1903–1951) penned the best-known example of modernist Persian prose, a short novel called Būf-i kūr (The Blind Owl) while living in Bombay in 1936. Critics writing in several languages have spilt barrels of ink attempting to make sense of the story, which presents readers with a narrative in two parts, told from the perspective of an opium-addicted pen-case painter living in squalor outside an unnamed city that may or may not be the ancient settlement of Ray, near modern Tehran, at an indeterminate time in history. This chapter briefly situates Hidāyat’s life and work within this historical moment before highlighting two relatively unexplored modernist facets of The Blind Owl: first, the elision of a key term, barzakh, from the earliest published manuscript when it was reprinted and, second, how both Hidāyat and his novel’s narrator situate themselves not between Iran and Europe but rather between Iran and India, thus redirecting our search for modernist beginnings in Persian literature.

World War I, the Turkish War of Independence, and the subsequent change of the empire into a republic, along with “revolutions in everyday life,” meant that from management and the legal system to clothing and the position of women, daily life had been massively transformed. Halide Edib Adıvar (1884–1964) and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar (1901–1962) are two authors whose works responded to such drastic change. Arslan and İmşir argue in this chapter through Halide Edib’s Maskeler ve Ruhlar/Masks or Souls? and Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute, that these authors understood and showed that this change was beyond national borders and, with what the two world wars showed, it was all-encompassing. In other words, Edib and Tanpınar should not be read solely in order to understand the political transformations of early Republican Turkey. Their works also testify to a global transformation that they present as threatening all individuals – including the writers themselves – with the possibility of becoming machines.

Martin Amis twice used the title ‘State of England’. This chapter considers his fiction as a series of reports on this subject. Despite a few intriguing and exceptional ventures into pastoral territory, most of Amis’s work is set in and around London, especially West London. From The Rachel Papers’s world of youth, the urban vision darkens into a dirty and dangerous city in which ‘the yobs are winning’. This social change is explored through Success, Money, London Fields, and Lionel Asbo. From Money on, Amis depicts an England influenced by the United States, yet which also retains its seemingly imperishable culture of pub and tabloid. Amis’s treatment of England is grim and biting, but Lionel Asbo allows a last hint of optimism.

Chapter 5 focuses on responsibility as an ethical category in a newly articulated political community. Drawing from the intellectual and political work of Bengali writer Syed Waliullah, this chapter offers an analysis of his existential call to freedom in the service of a new postcolonial subjectivity. Canonized on both sides of post-partitioned Bengal, Waliullah’s oeuvre – fiction, drama, short stories, essays and paintings – though composed almost entirely abroad, draws on the land and landscapes of rural Bengal, as it does on certain paradigms of existential philosophy; his protagonists, for example, are wracked by a singular and terrible sense of responsibility. How might we understand this complex negotiation beyond the most basic ascriptions of belatedness and mimicry? Because he was based in Paris for most of his life after government posts in England, Germany, Indonesia, and Australia, I suggest self-translation, as a larger philosophical venture and as a way to understand a metaphysical or existential line of questioning in this work. In the process, we see that both “situation” and “responsibility” become newly imbued with meaning in the context of a rural, postcolonial Bengal.

Drawn from a slight, icy novel of the towering Hindi poet Agyeya, a key figure of experimental poetry and modernist poetics in India, Chapter 2 focuses on the exit – or the form of renunciation – as a preoccupation of postcolonial literature. The novel To Each His Own Stranger (1961), written in India and revised and translated in Berkeley, California, is an exercise in the reconciliation of both Søren Kierkegaard’s Either/Or and Sartrean theories of being with the author’s heterodox reading of Hindu philosophy. This chapter argues for the late style – the exit – of Agyeya, explicitly different from the revolutionary subjectivity that characterizes his early magnum opus, the autobiographical novel Shekhar: Ek jivani, and his expressionistic, poetic oeuvre (including the haiku). Drawing on this text alongside the writer’s notebooks, originally titled Men Without Shadows, from the English translation of Sartre’s play, I suggest that modernism here is understood as a preoccupation with new forms of selfhood, alongside forms of asceticism. Moreover, this exit by avalanche (also referred to as “Zen experiment”) traces a particular genealogy of postcolonial selfhood, from rebellion to renunciation.

This chapter is on the triangular relation between romance, tragedy, and decolonization as both themes and tropes in African fiction. The primary concern in the chapter is the work of the novel in the late colonial period and first decade of independence in Africa when the genre was tied closely to the politics of cultural nationalism. A key premise in the chapter is that the turn to the novel among African elites was bifurcated. On one hand, the genre attracted African elites in the late colonial period because they assumed that the genre would best register the tragedy of colonization, notably its cultural deracination, its destruction of subjects, and its denial of African agency. On the other hand, the novel was often asked to help African subjects imagine a future beyond colonialism. The novel in Africa came to be structured by the need to develop a language in which the tragedy that was seen as a defining characteristic of colonial history and the lived experience of colonized subjects, would be countered by the romance of a future that the novel as a genre was imagining and willing into being.

The fact that the novel was an imported genre meant that African writers who sought to use it needed to signal its function in contexts that were far removed from the European experiences and ideas that had generated the emergence of the genre in the first place. This chapter takes up a simple but transformative question: How did novelistic genres travel from their assumed European centers to the outposts of empire and why and how did fictional forms acquire high cultural authority outside metropolitan settings? To answer this question, the chapter compares African novels to those produced in other colonial landscapes such as India not so much to identify a common purpose, but to show the deliberate process by which local writers brought local cultural elements, histories, and forms to domesticate the novel, to make them appear to be products of local communities and ideas even when they deployed familiar tropes. Popular novels could remind readers both of their colonial education in English literature and their connection or disconnection to the local customs rehearsed in fiction.

For most of its history in the twentieth century African literature has been haunted by the question of modernity. This chapter presents modernity as the overdetermining condition of literature in both colonialism and postcolonial society, examines how modernity came to exert its influence in the institution of African literature by hiding behind the mask of tradition, and treats modernity as both the cause and a symptom of the crisis associated with decolonial projects. This chapter is on the strategies developed by African writers to narrate this crisis: What does it mean to consider modernity as the overdetermining condition of African literature when the original impetus for this tradition of writing was the recuperation of precolonial histories and experiences? The chapter pays particular attention to the variety of forms in which the figure of the modern was represented in works that were not explicitly about modernity, most prominently Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart and Arrow of God, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, and Elechi Amadi’s The Concubine. These are novels where the referents are obviously precolonial while the ideas and the forms are about the nature and meaning of the modern.

This chapter revolves around cultures of the novel: When, how, and why did the novel, a genre without deep roots in African cultures and literary traditions, come to occupy such a dominant role in African literary history? Arriving late in the colonial period, the novel created new parameters for the African imagination and provided an opening for thinking about colonial modernity and its postcolonial consequences. The chapter discusses how the social functions of the novel came to be defined by two ostensibly contradictory functions. Through the invocation of realism, the novel would be celebrated as the medium of representing what were assumed to be the realities of African history, life, and subjectivity deracinated by colonial violence or misrepresented by colonialist fiction and criticism. At the same time, romantic tropes would be deployed to imagine alternative worlds and to promote the ideals of decolonization. Realism and romance would be wedded to invent national communities as counterpoints to colonial domination.

This chapter explores how fashion journalism shaped the development of the realist novel in nineteenth-century France. Drawing on scholarship that explores the interdependence of these forms of writing, it notes that both fashion journalists and novelists including Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, and Emile Zola seek to create what Roland Barthes described as the “reality effect” – in which the inclusion of particular details generates in the reader the sense that a text describes the real world. Ultimately, this chapter argues, the fantasy of fashion lies at the heart of the fantasy of realism as a way of representing the word, from fictional depictions of the values and mores of different social worlds to attempts to capture the experience of urban modernity. Hence fashion and femininity – though often dismissed or diminished by male realist novels – are at the heart of their literary innovations.

Approaches to La consagración de la primavera tend to consider that its central aspects are the historical and the autobiographical, judging the text for its ideological dimension and its stance on the Cuban Revolution. However, the omnipresent discourse on the arts and the figure of the artist, the way in which this is dealt with within the narration, as well as the intermedial devices used in it, confer on Carpentier’s penultimate novel the timelessness and universality of the Great Works. By textual analysis and a comprehension of the functioning of Carpentier’s aesthetic system, this chapter offers a humanist reading of a novel rooted in the dream of being a total work that metaphorically encompasses all arts and the writer’s own previous oeuvre.

This chapter traces the alignment between the Victorian novel, the articulation of geological, or “deep” time, and the emergence of the Anthropocene. The Victorian era is usually understood in terms of “uniformitarian” geology, in which Earth changes slowly and gradually, an understanding that has also informed understandings of the novel in the period. By contrast, this chapter unearths a latent “catastrophism” in Victorian fiction, examining geological events and underground spaces that reconfigure the conditions of possibility in works by Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, Bram Stoker, and Thomas Hardy.

Across the nineteenth century, from Lord Byron to Rudyard Kipling, the dominant blue ecology conceived of the ocean as infinite, unfathomable, and thus impervious to human activity. Humans could not threaten it; rather, it threatened them – a relation Charlotte Brontë, Joseph Conrad, and Robert Louis Stevenson emblematized with the figure of shipwreck. As Thomas Henry Huxley, George Henry Lewes, and other scientists disseminated their discoveries about the marine environment, however, its imagined unknowability and indestructability were put into question. Herman Melville documented the extractive enterprise of whaling; Philip Henry Gosse mourned tidepools ravaged by day trippers with a penchant for natural history. Writing about the tidal reaches of the River Thames, Charles Dickens and Henry Mayhew documented two-way traffic between land and water, human and ocean. A new understanding took shape that, in its depiction of the ocean as both affected by and affecting humanity, anticipates our own blue ecology.

There are many ways to define the “hip-hop novel,” each with its limitations. This omnibus review-essay considers titles from the past half-century of American fiction in which hip-hop intervenes as plot device, as character affinity, as author affiliation, as compositional logic, or as a way of limning the targeted readership. It investigates the culture’s representation in literary fiction, from its undigested appearance in the work of authors like Tom Wolfe, Don DeLillo, Richard Powers, and Percival Everett, to its deeper integration into novels by Adam Mansbach, Paul Beatty, and Sean Thor Conroe. It also examines the street lit genre initiated by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines, with books that count hip-hop artists as authors (C-Murder, Sister Souljah) or publishers (G-Unit Books). Finally, it looks to young-adult novels by Angie Thomas and Tiffany D. Jackson as a space where a reconciliation of these threads might be possible.

As a founding member of the Jane Austen Society in the 1940s, Bowen helped spearhead the arrangements that, as a world war raged and hundreds of thousands of other homes were destroyed, saved for the nation the Hampshire house where the Regency novelist had written her books. Through the society’s efforts, Chawton Cottage, in its new guise as Jane Austen’s House Museum, became, as it remains, a mainstay of the English heritage industry. In Bowen’s fiction and critical writing, evidence suggests that, despite the norms of periodisation, the later novelist valued her predecessor’s work not as an emblem of tradition and repository of heritage values, but for the way it supplied the formal resources for a modern or modernist future of fiction. More than a practitioner of domestic fiction and marriage plotting, the Austen to whom Bowen pays homage is a figure notable for her surgical precision and mastery of form. The restraint and ironic detachment that Bowen ascribes to Austen is not alien to Bowen’s commitment to human passion. As some of Bowen’s essays on Austen argue, the novelist made passion her study – a study that, Bowen found, could renew the novel form.

Beginning in the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen wrote literary criticism, book reviews, essays, and other non-fiction works for various media at a remarkably steady pace. Much of this writing centered on the novel – whether on contemporary novels that she reviewed, on classic works of English fiction for which she wrote introductions, or on the novel as a genre with an important history and an uncertain, yet vital, future. This essay traces the development of Bowen’s thinking about the novel and her gradual honing of an idiosyncratic descriptive vocabulary for the genre. It concentrates on a key set of writings that Bowen produced towards the end of, and just after, the Second World War, when she was at the height of her own fame as a novelist and when the history of what she regarded as the ‘free form’ of the novel, especially the recent history of the modernist novel, was a matter of urgent cultural discussion.