Reading in Dark Times

What can literature tell us about the making of the modern world? Examining a range of novelists and critics during the decades of decolonization, the cold war and globalization, Pankaj Mishra uncovers how political intelligence and literary sensibility became gradually disjunct in Anglo-American fiction and criticism, and the consequences that has for what and how we read. Examining writers from Naipaul to Don DeLillo, Natalia Ginzburg to Edward Said, Mishra explores the twenty-first century decline of Westen cultural promenence. In doing so, he unravels the literary, political and ideological clashes that make up contemporary fiction and reading. Taking its name from Hannah Arendt's Men in Dark Times, this book lays the foundation for radical, internationalist forms of cultural criticism. Like our cultural moment, Mishra traverses borders and languages, asking what kinds of worlds emerge through this literary and political landscape. What emerges is a new mode of understanding the delicate balance of interiority and social upheaval, one no longer indebted to the Western canon, politically detached criticisms or Anglo-American hegemony.