Literary Globalism: Anglo-American Fiction Set in France

The reaction of a Frenchwoman in Diane Johnson's Le Mariage to a gathering of Americans in Paris identifies what has become an increasingly widespread literary and cultural phenomenon: Was this a reception for someone who had written a book, another book, about France? Zut, they produced then endlessly, Anglophones and their books. In a series of interrelated essays on significant and representative examples of such books, Literary Globalism: Anglo-American Fiction Set in France explores their form and content as well as the context and meaning of their current importance. The work of Johnson, Rose Tremain, Joanne Harris, Claire Messud, Sarah Smith, and Edmund White, among others, provides a framework for the consideration of the emergence of a specifically literary counterpart to a process of globalization usually seen as exclusively economic and political. The novels studied reveal a set of diverse but related textual strategies and thematic interests that identify certain aspects of postmodern writing as characteristic both of contemporary English-language novels set in France and of a new literary globalism.