Lena Mattheis - Translocality in Contemporary City Novels

The Literary Urban Studies Series has a thematic focus on literary mediations and representations of urban conditions. Its specific interest is in developing interdisciplinary methodological approaches to the study of literary cities. Echoing the Russian formalist interest in literaturnost or literariness, Literary Urban Studies will emphasize the citiness of its study objectthe elements that are specific to the city and the urban conditionand an awareness of what this brings to the source material and what it implies in terms of methodological avenues of inquiry. The series focus allows for the inclusion of perspectives from related fields such as urban history, urban planning, and cultural geography. The series sets no restrictions on period, genre, medium, language, or region of the source material. Interdisciplinary in approach and global in range, the series actively commissions and solicits works that can speak to an international and cross-disciplinary audience.

Editorial boardEditorial board:

Ulrike Zitzlsperger, University of Exeter, UK; Peta Mitchell, University of Queensland, Australia; Marc Brosseau, University of Ottawa, Canada; Andrew Thacker, De Montfort University, UK; Patrice Nganang, Stony Brook University, USA; Bart Keunen, University of Ghent, Belgium.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15888

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

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As I am preparing this book for publication, the world looks quite different from when I started writing it in 2016. A few months after I had begun to shape a vague notion about the interesting spatialities of contemporary global writing into a thesis, the outcomes of the Brexit referendum and of the US presidential elections unsettled the Anglophone world. The shockwaves were tangible, also in the more slow-paced literary scene, and can be felt in some of the most recently published translocal novels.

Now, in the summer of 2020, the world has changed yet again. A global pandemic has reinstated rigid borders and put restrictions on movement to a degree that most of us have never experienced. At the height of the pandemicin response to police brutality, systemic racism and institutional violencethe Black Lives Matter movement has initiated global protest at unprecedented scales.