'The story takes place': Claire Messud's The Last Life and the cosmopolitan imaginary
The work of the Franco-American novelist, Claire Messud, remains under-explored. This article focuses on her 1999 novel, The Last Life, in relation to the idea of 'literary globalism'. Recent scholarship has generated work on 'world literature' as an emerging theoretical paradigm...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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2013-07-06.
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| Online Access: | Get fulltext Get fulltext |
| Summary: | The work of the Franco-American novelist, Claire Messud, remains under-explored. This article focuses on her 1999 novel, The Last Life, in relation to the idea of 'literary globalism'. Recent scholarship has generated work on 'world literature' as an emerging theoretical paradigm. I locate her novel in relation to this generally, but more crucially to the category of 'the cosmopolitan imaginary'. Cosmopolitanism is a key term in social theory and political philosophy but has yet to gain critical currency in relation to the literary. The work of Messud is crucial here in its exploration of the legacies of Algerian decolonisation in the South of France and in its negotiation of cross-cultural identities and cultural displacement. |
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