Acknowledgments  ix

Introduction  1

1. Real Virtualities and the Undead Genre  39

Part I. World

2. World-Making and Possible Worlds  69

3. Spectral Worlds, Networked Novel  87

4. From Midnight's Child to Clown Assassin  110

Part II. War

5. Visualizing Wartime: A Literary Genealogy  135

6. The Sky Is Falling: The Narrative Screen of Terror  157

Part III. Witness

7. This I Saw: Graphic Suffering  175

8. Forensic Witnessing: The (Non)Evidence of Bones  192

9. Affective Witnessing: Orphic Netherworlds  219

Coda  249

Notes  261

Bibliography  279

Index  293

"A dense, learned, and important study of the emergence of “this thing called the world” as its inhabitants pass from spectatorship to witnessing of trauma under the prevailing conditions of intensified mediation, remediation, and hypermediation. . . . A rich resource that will be mined by many. . . . Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty."
  — K. Tölölyan, Choice

"This is a brave book, a valiant and valuable book, that seeks to characterize post-1989 fiction as ekphrastically humanitarian." — Eugene Eoyang, World Literature Today

"This Thing Called the World both models and theorizes a grounded approach to modern world literature, urging its critics, despite our habit to look beyond the horizon, not to forget the dirt beneath our own feet." — Christopher McVey, Studies in the Novel

"Against the grain of much contemporary criticism, which has jettisoned the notion of imaginative sympathy from literary discourse, Ganguly seizes on exactly this as critical to the post-1989 experience: 'the information technology revolution has radically transformed our threshold of responsibility to our distant others and has perforce brought worlds of untold suffering into our intimate spaces.'" — Michael LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement

"Ganguly’s disentangling of the terms 'postcolonial,' 'global,' and 'world' in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. . . . A brave and important book." — Claire Chambers, MFS Modern Fiction Studies

"Beautifully connects the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to their contemporary equivalent . . . Ganguly remains true to the real-world voices of the novelists throughout her work, marrying aesthetics and ethics. . . . She also maintains a refreshing level of detail within the texts themselves, sweeping readers into the heart-wrenching and critical foci of the novels’ collectivity while maintaining a thorough, accessible argument outlining specific interventions into our global understanding." — Beth Miller, The Comparatist

"A dense, learned, and important study of the emergence of “this thing called the world” as its inhabitants pass from spectatorship to witnessing of trauma under the prevailing conditions of intensified mediation, remediation, and hypermediation. . . . A rich resource that will be mined by many. . . . Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty."
  —K. Tölölyan, Choice

"This is a brave book, a valiant and valuable book, that seeks to characterize post-1989 fiction as ekphrastically humanitarian." —Eugene Eoyang, World Literature Today

"This Thing Called the World both models and theorizes a grounded approach to modern world literature, urging its critics, despite our habit to look beyond the horizon, not to forget the dirt beneath our own feet." —Christopher McVey, Studies in the Novel

"Against the grain of much contemporary criticism, which has jettisoned the notion of imaginative sympathy from literary discourse, Ganguly seizes on exactly this as critical to the post-1989 experience: 'the information technology revolution has radically transformed our threshold of responsibility to our distant others and has perforce brought worlds of untold suffering into our intimate spaces.'" —Michael LaPointe, Times Literary Supplement

"Ganguly’s disentangling of the terms 'postcolonial,' 'global,' and 'world' in the introduction is much needed and persuasive. . . . A brave and important book." —Claire Chambers, MFS Modern Fiction Studies

"Beautifully connects the sentimental novels of the eighteenth century to their contemporary equivalent . . . Ganguly remains true to the real-world voices of the novelists throughout her work, marrying aesthetics and ethics. . . . She also maintains a refreshing level of detail within the texts themselves, sweeping readers into the heart-wrenching and critical foci of the novels’ collectivity while maintaining a thorough, accessible argument outlining specific interventions into our global understanding." —Beth Miller, The Comparatist

"In this compelling study, Debjani Ganguly makes a powerful case for novelistic witnessing as a countervailing force in today’s 'mediated deathscapes' of terrorism and state violence. Situated at the intersection of postcolonial theory, world literature, and media studies, This Thing Called the World will interest anyone who wants to think freshly about the function of literature, and of criticism, at the present time."
  — David Damrosch, Harvard University

"This Thing Called the World makes a superb contribution to the study of the contemporary novel and to the energetic debates on world literature. Debjani Ganguly's work is informed throughout by her deep and subtle understanding of the scholarship on the history of the novel and a broad range of literary, media, and political theory. Her close readings of the wellchosen and impressively extensive primary texts are invariably fine and are often stunning in their nuance and insight. An extremely important and significant book."
  — Ian Baucom, author of, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History

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