| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,300,000)
Fiscal Year 2003: ¥1,000,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,000,000)
Fiscal Year 2002: ¥1,100,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,100,000)
Fiscal Year 2001: ¥1,200,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,200,000)
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| Research Abstract |
I explore certain features of a global culture newly emerging at the dawn of the twentieth century through an examination of American major novels as faithful documents of such a new trend. Globalization has become a popular topic among sociologies, economists, and literary critics in the past ten years, but current work on globalization tend to focus on contemporary society and literature. Assuming that the origin of contemporary global culture could be found about one hundred years ago, I apply recent globalization theory to late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Western world and American literature, and show how skillfully major American novelists such as Henry James, who claims himself to be a cosmopolitan, represent distinct features of their new global community. In particular, I argue that in his novels James describes the world forcefully brought together by a new capitalist, consumer culture and also he presents another kind of cosmopolitan culture, that is, a hybrid Creole culture. Moreover, as the focus of critical attention has begun to shift from "globalization" to "empire" after terrorists' attacks to the United States, I became interested in the connection between globalization and imperialism/colonialism, considering that at the turn of the century different nations and cultures were mixed together but such a mixing produced asymmetrical, hierarchical relations among them.
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