ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses some of the most salient formal trends in literary fiction of the early twenty-first century. It presents the idea of networked fiction further by zooming in on a particular strand of contemporary fiction dealing with globalization: the major subgenre of twenty-first century writing that has come to be known as ‘global fiction’. The book suggests that twenty-first century writing on topics frequently ‘reveals all the other deep fiduciary investments in Big Others that circulate unnoticed within the contemporary novel: family, work and, most destructively, capital’. It examines literary fiction’s responses to some of the early twenty-first century’s most paradigm-shifting events. The book argues that writers engaging with money and markets in the twenty-first century ‘are united by their foregrounding of the profound ways in which human emotion and imagination are implicated in the abstract processes of financial exchange’.
