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Saturday, July 21, 2012

World Literature according to Pico Iyer

I like Pico Iyer's description of the advent of the "world" into the Anglo-American literary horizon:
It was as if all the doors and windows of a stuffy Havisham house [traditional Brit lit] had suddenly been thrown open, to admit new sounds, strange spices, tropical colors, new histories and even new ways of telling history: new writers emerging for a new world and a new kind of reader. A generation later, it seems we are witnessing the same thing in American literature. So "world fiction" has joined world music and fusion cuisine as a radically new and liberating feature of our all-over-the-place age of movement and cross-cultural collision and collusion. And these writers from everywhere are not just chronicling, but actively charting, the America of tomorrow. 

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