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Nadia Butt

Mobility, Migration, Modernity: The Global Novel and Its Theory 

This lecture provides the theoretical frames of the global novel in the twenty-first century. Drawing upon existing research on the global novel in relation to world literature, postcolonial literature, diasporic literature, transcultural or transnational literature, the aim is to define the global novel from the perspective of global change, modernity, mass migration and mobility, the realities of which have fundamentally shaped the form and content of the novel today. My contention is that the global novel can be theorised in three major ways: First, how it reveals the outcome of travel, mobility, and migration; second, how the experience of displacement and exile are often essential to the global novel third, how the global novel unfolds the challenges of the diasporic condition. To this end, I will allude to a significant number of novels from the Global South, which can be read from the theoretical framework presented in the lecture.