Globalisation and its Discontents

Like Freud's `civilisation', globalisation is both cause and consequence of its own discontents, visible at times only in the resistances it generates. Study of the phenomenon has until recently been confined largely to economists and political and social scientists. The present volume brings a range of literary and cultural analyses to bear to demonstrate both its actual time-depth and the all-encompassing nature of its influences on culture and consciousness. The English language and English literature have been major elements in its forging, underwriting first British and then American cultural hegemony.

Unlike most readings of globalisation, these essays depict not an irresistible juggernaut but a process that, in generating its own resistances, opens up the possibility of an alternative world order founded not on the inequities of power and capital, but on shared commitment to a fragile planet and a common and universal culture.

Ranging from Homer to Michael Crichton, Shakespeare to Suleyman Al-Bassam, John Donne to Les Murray, John Keats to Derek Walcott, Conrad, Gissing and Edward Lear to V. S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie, and addressing, among many others, writers as diverse as Paul Valéry and Edouard Glissant, Gertrude Stein and Wallace Stevens, George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn and Storm Jameson, Eliot, Yeats and Auden, Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon, these essays explore a remarkable range of responses to the process of globalisation from earliest times to the present day.

Contributors: STAN SMITH, GRAHAM HOLDERNESS, BRYAN LOUGHREY, JENNIFER BIRKETT, PHYLLIS LASSNER, SHARON OUDITT, TONY SHARPE, EDWARD LARRISSY, MICHAEL MURPHY, LIAM CONNELL

Details

First Published: 20 Jul 2006
13 Digit ISBN: 9781843840756
Pages: 224
Size: 21.6 x 13.8
Binding: Hardback
Imprint: D.S.Brewer
Series: Essays and Studies
Subject: English & American Literature
BIC Class: DS

Details updated on 07 Feb 2012

Contents

• 1  Introduction: Globalisation and its Discontents
• 2  Arabesque: Shakespeare and Globalisation
• 3  [En] Countering Globalisation: Resistances in the System
• 4  Double Trouble: George Orwell, Martha Gellhorn and the War to End Global Imperialism
• 5  Lost Worlds: Southern Italy and the Resistance to Globalisation
• 6  The Planet on the Table: Some Modernist Perspectives on Globalisation
• 7  Irish Writing and Globalisation
• 8  Local Habitations, Global Names: Les Murray and the Poetry Superleague
• 9  Business as Usual: The Image of the Corporation in the Cultures of Globalisation
• 10  Epic Logos: On Last Looking into Several Homers