This special-focus issue of American Book Review addresses in the words of its guest editor, Professor Christian Moraru, a defining development in contemporary, especially 21st-century American and other literatures and cultures: the “worlding” of the aesthetic imaginary. As the contributors point out with reference to recent titles and developments in fiction, theory, and criticism, American writers see themselves, more substantially than ever before in the history of U. S. literature, with the wider world. They are so insistent and so insightful in their worldly reiterations of Americanness and in their American inscriptions of the world that critics are already talking about new “genres” such as the global, transnational, or planetary novel.

Christian Moraru is Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He is the author and editor of a number of books, including Cosmodernism: American Narrative, Late Globalization, and the New Cultural Imaginary (University of Michigan Press, 2011), The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (Northwestern University Press, 2015, coedited with Amy J. Elias), and Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Professor Moraru was a Fulbright Specialist at the University of Bucharest in May 2015.