Tour du Monde : David Mitchell's Ghostwritten and the Cosmopolitan Imagination

Abstract

David Mitchell's Ghostwritten (1999) pioneers a new narrative modus operandi for twenty-first-century British fiction. Using Mitchell's novel as a case study, the article revives Benedict Anderson's influential oppositioning of tour d'horizon , which is the realm of both the nation and the novel, and tour du monde , which remains outside either's vision and, as the article demonstrates, constitutes the representational realm of the cosmopolitan novel. The cosmopolitan novel's evolution out of its nationally bounded predecessor is charted analogically to Arjun Appadurai's distinction between old and new systems of political organization as "vertebrate" (signifying fixed traditions of strictly inter/nationalist thinking) and "cellular" (signifying the new unpredictable mutability of global/transnational flows). Following Nancy Armstrong's How Novels Think (2006), the article also explores the possible impact of cosmopolitan representation on the formation of new global subjectivities.