New Intersections in Fiction: Cosmopolitanism, Culture, and Economics

This chapter is about the manifestations in which the postmillennial novel unfolds the ways of engaging with vernacular cosmopolitanism at the crossing of cultural and economic realities, which can be observed in narrative approaches to cosmopolitanism’s common themes. To make sense of twenty-first-century narratives of cosmopolitanism, we do need a set of new terminology: narrative glocality for the novels’ overall attitude toward cosmopolitan culture, one that is informed by both the global and the local, cosmoflâneur for a narrator or character who is involved in urban cosmopolitanism on an everyday basis, political hyper-awareness and narrative immediacy for ways of responding in novels to socioeconomic conditions brought about by cosmopolitanism. This chapter is a discussion of these defining features of twenty-first-century cosmopolitan novels.