Beyond Material Circuits and Formal Imprints: The Global Novel as a Critical Concept

This article is an introduction to the special issue ‘Critical Responses to the Global‐Novel Debate: Bridging Material Objects and Forms’. It looks critically at the global novel debate and proposes to understand the novelistic interests for representing a global imagination from a different angle. Scholarship on the global novel debate has been mostly divided between formal and sociological approaches and has taken a dominant Anglophone perspective and corpus. The four essays that compose the issue cross circulation data and formal features in order to highlight new aspects that deserve attention. They do so by analysing a corpus from diverse literary traditions that is not usually included in the global novel discussion. The articles shed new light on understudied critical problems in the global novel scholarship such as ecotemporalities, evolving interpretations derived from uneven re‐publishing paths, branding of exotic discourses, contradictory uses of multilingualism and translation in the promotion of peripheral writers, and gatekeeping in growing promotional forms such as literary festivals.