Neoliberalism and the Novel / Edition 1

by Emily Johansen, Alissa Karl

Overview

The novel form has long been connected to modern capitalism and is, arguably, the literary genre most prominently enmeshed in contemporary global markets. Yet, as many critics have suggested about capital, something has changed in the last forty years. With the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant global economic rationality and mode of governance, the experience of capital has produced new ways of seeing and relating to the world, leading, as David Harvey observes, to "the financialization of everything". The novel, indexed to capital in myriad ways, then, must similarly have been transformed.

Neoliberalism and the Novel investigates both those changes wrought to the novel form by changing arrangements of capital, and the novel’s broader engagement with neoliberalism itself. The chapters in this book consider these questions from a variety of angles, attending to the way in which the neoliberal novel deploys familiar generic patterns as a site from which to offer critique; examining the changing operation of labour and time under neoliberalism and its effect on novel form; and offering a broader call for new reading and interpretative practices to respond to changing socio-economic realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367028336
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	01/08/2019
Pages:	198
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Emily Johansen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA. Her book, Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, was released in 2014. She has written recent articles for Critique, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Textual Practice.

Alissa G. Karl is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport, NY, USA. Her research investigates the economic histories and imaginaries that impact the production and form of modern and contemporary literature and culture, and has appeared in such venues as American Literature, Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, and Textual Practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction: reading and writing the economic present 1. The betrayals of neoliberalism in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy 2. Margaret Atwood’s dystopic fiction and the contradictions of neoliberal freedom 3. Neoliberalism and the limits of the human: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach 4. Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction 5. The banal conviviality of neoliberal cosmopolitanism 6. Managed risk and the lure of transparency in Anglophone African detective noir 7. The zero hour of the neoliberal novel 8. Neoliberalism and the time of the novel