Modernist Setting in Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners and Ian Rankin’s Watchman

Abstract

This article focuses on the modernist representation of fictional settings in Caryl Phillips’s Foreigners and Ian Rankin’s Watchman. The main focus of the study is the literary experimentation with these novels’ settings to fictionalize the drastic changes that took place in the world in modernism. These novels depict new social, political, cultural, and economic changes during the initial phases of modernism. The study will accentuate the fictional settings as a medium of expression of these changes used by Phillips and Rankin. Such expression symbolizes modernism and its impact on world nations. They experiment with the settings of their novels as an exemplification of the complex world relations in modernism, whereby multicultural interactions; whereby multicultural interactions became prominent That is, the world’s multi-ethnicities emerged and interacted with each other in modernism, providing global relations. As such, new globalism opened the door for new mutual perspectives among world nations