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MARX, JOHN. Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. viii + 246. $96.95.
John Marx's Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel positions the modern anglophone novel as a "species of governmentality," aligning literary criticism and literature with social scientific research in the spirit of interdisciplinary collaboration for purposes of reciprocal insight (9). Marx founds his study on an important, if uncontroversial, claim: literature is best seen as a "practice or manner of producing the world" (11). Turning away from narrow constructions of fiction as (sub)genres or periodized artifacts or ideological constructs, Marx focuses on the novel as a highly mimetic intervention into how humans shaped and continue to shape their societies on an interpersonal scale in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Marx concurs with Woolf's oft-cited declaration that "on or about December 1910" a lot changed (19). For him, this singular change revolves around the twentieth-century novel's interrogation of classic liberalism with its apotheosis of the rational man, the self-regulating individual, hierarchical governmentality, colonial administrative order, etc., and, collaterally, its delimning of new forms of human association and organization. "Where Mill's liberalism tended to legislate a distinction between autonomous actors and communal populations," he writes, "twentieth-century writing blurs this distinction" (46). Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel attends to novels that challenge established modes of governmentality in political and economic life, with their emphasis on experts and specialists, and their concomitant diminution of the role...