Introduction: Cosmopolitanism’s New Orientations

Twenty-first-century cosmopolitan fiction primarily deals with two intersecting areas within it: culture and economics. In par with the contemporary orientation toward particularism from universalism in cosmopolitan thinking, literary criticism is also beginning to tend toward considerations of locality and particularism in the analysis of fiction that has emerged since the millennium. With the emergence of this new cosmopolitan world, which is unparalleled owing to the technological capacity to connect everyone and everything across its borders, new debates around the concept of cosmopolitanism and its meaning have been inaugurated. This chapter traces the passage from universalist to vernacular cosmopolitanism, and in the end, offers a synthesis of meanings of the latter as the following chapters will employ this umbrella term in the analysis of cosmopolitan fiction.