New Global Realism: Thinking Totality in the Contemporary Novel [Hardcover]

Shortlisted for theBACLS Monograph Prize 2025

A comparative study of contemporary realist novels that employ totality as a method and a formal principle to represent the social and economic inequalities of the present, this book examines writing in English, Italian, Kannada, and Spanish by authors from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Italy, India and Mexico.

By theorizing four modalities of totalization employed by contemporary realist writers, this book explores the current resurgence of realism and challenges critical approaches that consider it naive or formally unsophisticated. Instead, it argues that realist novels offer a self-conscious and serious representation of the world we inhabit while actively envisioning new social designs and political configurations. Through comparative studies of novels by Fernanda Melchor, NoViolet Bulawayo, Vivek Shanbhag, Nicola Lagioia, Igiaba Scego, Yaa Gyasi and Roberto Bola?o, this book further explains why realism can be a powerful antidote to the skepticism about the possibility of making truth-claims in humanist research.

A comparative study of contemporary realist novels that employ totality as a method and a formal principle to represent the social and economic inequalities of the present, this book studies writing in English, Italian, Kannada, and Spanish by authors from Zimbabwe, Ghana, Italy, India and Mexico.Gabriele Lazzariis a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Surrey, UK.This is a very exciting book; timely, intellectual, and moving in all the right directions of the future of literary study. Professor Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, UK

Introduction  New Global Realism: Totality, Scale, and Humanistic Truth
Chapter 1  Intensive Localization: Geographies of Violence and Displacement in Fernanda Melchor and NoViolet Bulawayo
Chapter 2  Combination in the Semi-Peripheral Novel: Vivek Shanbhag and Nicola Lagioia
Chapter 3  Juxtaplƒb