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This chapter focuses on the global British novel. While the novel as such has its roots in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century romance, the British novel owes its emergence and subsequent rise to global supremacy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to the expansion and ascendancy of the British Empire. The history of the globalization of the British novel in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is therefore by necessity a history of negotiations and compromises between the foreign British form at the core of the literary system and the various local realities in the peripheral zones. Consequently, the chapter's discussion of the British novel's transmission to America, the West Indies, India, and Europe will focus on variations in the dynamic interaction between the core's formal influence and local resistance; between hegemonic ideology and local mentalités; and between global markets and local material practices.

This chapter offers a limited survey of the ways that British regional novelists have engaged in the processes of place-making. It examines novels from England, Scotland, and Wales. In doing so, the chapter gives particular focus to the way that late twentieth-century and contemporary novelists have adapted the techniques of earlier writers in order to attend to the complex intertwining of the local and the global. To that end the chapter shows that while the contemporary regional novel continues to depict the distinguishing features of an ‘area and its people’ it does so by attending to the relations between this local distinctiveness and the wider world. By focusing on the way that these novels function as a form of place-making, this chapter also shows how such novels manage to articulate the region as a negotiation between local distinctiveness and universal homogeneity.

This concluding chapter presents three arguments from this book regarding the study of stereotypes in South Asia. Stereotypical portraits urge a critical evaluation of one's psychic, social, and political allegiances in a transnational world carved on the basis of differences mediated by colonial and neo-imperial sensibilities. First, stereotypes reveal the beleaguered nature of mimesis itself, caught between stilted realism and an anxious fantasy. Second, stereotypes especially in global novels, encourage people to recognize the genre of the global novel itself as forwarding a fiction about divided worlds. Third, stereotypes compel people to consider how their readings are swayed by commonplace signs that gesture to more, less, and other than what they seem.