How Bilingual Novelists Utilize their Linguistic Knowledge: Towards a Typology of the Contemporary ‘Modern Languages Novel’ in English

We present in survey form a typology of a new sub-genre we term the English ‘Modern Languages Novel’, identifying four overlapping categories in a large sample of fiction, most of it by authors whose work has been submitted to the Booker or Man-Booker Prize over fifty years between 1969 and 2018. The four types are: novels featuring a cultural intermediary, such as a language teacher or spy, as narrative focaliser in a foreign setting (Travel); novels written after a period of exposure to linguistic and cultural difference but which do not directly thematise the experience (Alienation); novels with snippets of untranslated dialogue or other quotations from other languages (The Non-Translated); and finally novels set in a new language environment without an Anglophone focaliser (Assimilation). We comment on examples of each type and present an explanation for the invisibility of the sub-genre up to now.