This study has argued that a renewed interest in the imagination among contemporary Anglophone writers comes as a response to the perceived consolidation of an imperialist form of capitalism as a world-system. The texts in this study characterized the epistemological task assigned the imagination as one that requires identifying individual experiences in terms of broader economic, political, and social conditions. The imagination, in other words, is consistently conceptualized in intersubjective terms, and the novels in this study struggle to portray what it might mean to imagine together: characterizing imagining not as an individual pursuit that withdraws people from the world around them but as a social practice that engages people with the experiences and worldviews of others.

We also observed, however, that to the extent that novels portray anything resembling a “politics of imagining,” such portrayals tend to cast human relations in highly abstracted terms, divorced from the class systems, racial ascriptions, and cultural differences that limit the range of possible interactions among people. If philosophers of the imagination including Ricoeur, Brann, and Kearney argue for a utopian dimension to imagining, this should not be surprising. As all of the authors in this study recognize, to posit the existence of the imagination in the contemporary context is to concede both that the senses are bombarded by various forms of propaganda and that the mental activities associated with human rationality are often insufficient to overcome the distortions they cause.