Swallowing a World

Swallowing a World offers a new theorization of the maximalist novel. Though its typically cast as a (white, male) genre of U.S. fiction, maximalism, Benjamin Bergholtz argues, is an aesthetic response to globalization and a global phenomenon in its own right. Bergholtz considers a selection of massive and meandering novels that crisscross from London and Lusaka to Kingston, Kabul, and Kashmir and that represent, formally reproduce, and ultimately invite reflection on the effects of globalization. Each chapter takes up a maximalist novel that simultaneously maps and formally mimics a cornerstone of globalization, such as the postcolonial culture industry (Salman Rushdies Midnights Children), the rebirth of fundamentalism (Zadie Smiths White Teeth), the transnational commodification of violence (Marlon Jamess A Brief History of Seven Killings), the obstruction of knowledge by narrative (Zia Haider Rahmans In the Light of What We Know), and globalizations gendered, asymmetrical growth (Namwali Serpells The Old Drift). By reframing analysis of maximalism around globalization, Swallowing a World not only reimagines one of the most perplexing genres of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries but also sheds light on some of the most perplexing political problems of our precarious present.