Abstract

The article situates David Mitchell's imagination of planetary interconnectedness in the historical development of global English. It argues that Cloud Atlas projects a denationalized, centrifugal vision of the world, only to entrench it in a cohesive, centripetal anglophone network through fictionalized scenes of reading. The novel assigns the English text a privileged position in fostering global connections and renders its cultural other unrepresentable in order to maintain a coherent representational system over a heterolingual world. Mitchell's imagination of a textually embedded connectivity descends from an older ideology of literature-as-mediation that originated from colonial literary education.

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