A sweeping inquiry into postCold War American literature and theory, Cosmodernism argues, cautiously but persuasively, for the rise of a new cultural paradigm against the backdrop of accelerating globalisation. Moraru calls this paradigm ""cosmodern."" He uses the term to account for what seems to be gradually challenging the postmodern over the last twenty-odd years. Not so much a well-structured movement yet, cosmodernism is chiefly a critical construct enabling Moraru to articulate representative literary-theoretical interventions of the past two decades into a reasonably coherent model. The coherence inheres, he shows, in a certain ""relational"" imaginary, which the critic canvasses by placing a wide range of authors and works in, across, and against the material-conceptual networks of globalisation, cosmopolitanism, modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, multiculturalism, and other areas of contemporary U.S. intellectual history.