Chris and Thom Dancer (University of Toronto) co-wrote the introductory essay "The Novel at the Limit" for this special issue of Critique. The issue includes articles on novels from South Africa, Sudan, Meso-America, Britain, and the United States.
Here's the abstract for a bit more detail: Despite its 18th century origins, the novel appears remarkably resilient in adapting to the global demands of the 21st century. Largely distanced from concerns of the domestic comedy, studies of the contemporary novel tend to focus on the form’s ability to engage and respond on a global scale to transnational capitalism, neocolonialism, international warfare, and the ecological pressures of a beleaguered planet. Critics routinely approach the novel as a nexus for trans-historical understanding and a model for scalar thinking about the planet in crisis. What these approaches overlook are the myriad ways in which the novel quite ostentatiously theorizes a limit to its own vantage on the world. In a so-called age of the world, the novel appears to be a partisan of blindness over insight. Even as we become increasingly entangled within networks of global connection, our experience of the world and context for the knowledge we claim of that world continues to be mediated locally. As such, the failure to know describes one of the most salient features–and representational strengths–of the contemporary novel.
