1st Edition
The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics
The study of literature and economics is by no means a new one, but since the financial crash of 2008, the field has grown considerably with a broad range of both fiction and criticism. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics is the first authoritative guide tying together the seemingly disparate areas of literature and economics.
Drawing together 38 critics, the Companion offers both an introduction and a springboard to this sometimes complex but highly relevant field. With sections on "Critical traditions," "Histories," "Principles," and "Contemporary culture," the book looks at examples from Medieval and Renaissance literature through to poetry of the Great Depression and novels depicting the 2008 financial crisis. Covering topics from Austen to austerity, Marxism to modernism, the collated essays offer indispensable analysis of the relationship between literary studies and the economy.
Representing a wide spectrum of approaches, this book introduces the basics of economics, while engaging with essential theory and debate. As the reality of economic hardship and disparity is widely acknowledged and spreads across disciplines, this Companion offers students and scholars a chance to enter this crucially important interdisciplinary area.
1. Introduction PART I: Critical traditions 2. What is literary knowledge of economy? 3. The politics of form and poetics of identity in postwar American poetry 4. Rhetorical economics 5. Labor without value, language at a price: toward a narrative poetics for the financial turn PART II: Histories 6. Premodern economics: ideas, literature, and contexts 7. John Smith and the virus of trade 8. Gothic economies: capitalism and vampirism 9. The print revolution and paper money 10. The economics of American literary realism 11. Women’s writing and the mainstreaming of political economy 12. Modernism and macroeconomics 13. American modernism and the crash of 1929 14. Friedrich Hayek and the pleasures of liberal thought of modern Japan 15. Free trade masculinity and the literature of NAFTA PART III: Principles 16. Asymmetric information 17. Black markets 18. Classical economics 19. Consumption: cultures of crisis. overprotection, and twenty-first-century literature 20. Corporate space 21. Currency 22. Literature and energy 23. Financialisation 24. Globalisation: everything in chains; the aesthetics of global capitalism 25. Inflation 26. Keynes and Keynesianism 27. Neoclassical economics 28. Neoliberalism 29. Real-estate confessions: moral realism in a risk economy 30. Reproduction 31. Secular stagnation and the discourse of reproductive limit 32. Social want 33. Speculation PART IV: Contemporary culture 34. "The real home of capitalism": The AOL Time Warner merger and capital flight 35.. Hamilton, credit, and American enterprise 36. Global finance and scale: literary form and economics in Mohsin Hamid's How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia 37. Behavioral economics and genre 38. Serialization in the age of finance capitalism
Biography
Matt Seybold is an Assistant Professor of American Literature and Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, USA. He publishes on American literature and economics.
Michelle Chihara is an Assistant Professor of English at Whittier College, USA, as well as Section Editor of the Economics and Finance section of the Los Angeles Review of Books. She publishes both fiction and nonfiction, with emphasis on economics, finance, and contemporary culture.
