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Palgrave Macmillan

Multilingualism and the Twentieth-Century Novel

Polyglot Passages

  • Book
  • © 2019

Overview

  • Proposes a different chronology to established periodisations of twentieth-century literature
  • Explores the potential of the novel to account for multilingualism
  • Consider the response multilingualism offers to a history of colonialism

Part of the book series: New Comparisons in World Literature (NCWL)

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Table of contents (6 chapters)

Keywords

About this book

This book argues that the Anglophone novel in the twentieth century is, in fact, always multilingual. Rooting its analysis in modern Europe and the Caribbean, it recognises that monolingualism, not multilingualism, is a historical and global rarity, and argues that this fact must inform our study of the novel, even when it remains notionally Anglophone. Drawing principally upon four authors – Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Wilson Harris and Junot Díaz – this study argues that a close engagement with the novel reveals a series of ways to apprehend, depict and theorise various kinds of language diversity. In so doing, it reveals the presence of the multilingual as a powerful shaping force for the direction of the novel from 1900 to the present day which cuts across and complicates current understandings of modernist, postcolonial and global literatures.

Authors and Affiliations

  • University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    James Reay Williams

About the author

James Reay Williams holds a PhD from Queen Mary University of London, UK, and has lectured at Queen Mary and the University of Exeter.

Bibliographic Information

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