Introduction: The Globalization of Fiction/the Fiction of Globalization

Forms such as the fabliau, Mennipean satire, and autobiography provide evidence of cultural migrations dating as far back as the medieval period; literature was global, then, before it was ever national. 3 And as Stephen Greenblatt points out, ''English literature was always an unsteady amalgam of Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, and other voices of the vanquished, along with the voices of the dominant English regions, and the English language itself, so securely and apparently imperturbably at the center of the field, is revealed, under the pressure of examination, to be a mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium.'' 4 It seems reasonable to suggest, then, that literature in general, and Anglophone literature in particular, is-and perhaps always has been-globalized.