The Novel as Global Form. Poetic Challenges and Cross-border Literary Circulation

This project is funded by the Spanish Research Agency (Reference: PID2020-118610GA-I00 / AEI / 10.13039/501100011033).

The project introduces a new, more integrated, and decentralized perspective in the study of the emergent genre of the global novel, defined as a narrative form that aspires to represent and think about the contemporary world from a global perspective. This new approach will help us better understand how the global novel contributes, discusses and builds global discourses through specific exploratory poetics. Simultaneously, it will help map the uneven circulation of these literary works through a digital cartographic research model based on global translation flows and international critical reception, sales, and prizes already developed by the I+D project MapModern (PI Diana Roig-Sanz).

Through a selected group of post-1989 novels beyond the current Anglophone corpus, the project will innovatively cross the poetic and sociological approaches to the genre, the separated adoption of which is now producing contradictory definitions and simplifications. Through this crossing, the GlobalNovel project aims to understand how contemporary novels address global matters, such as global violence, inequality, migration, or climate change, at the same time that it attends to how these novels circulate at a large scale in the international literary markets.

International team: Jorge Locane (University of Oslo), Jernej Habjan (Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts), Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University), Debjani Ganguly (Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, University of Virginia).