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Non-Normative Sexualities in US Latinx and Latin American Literature Through a Capitalist Lens studies how Latin American and Latinx authors represent non-normative sexualities through a capitalist lens. In our society, heterosexuality manifests as privilege and has been normalized to such an extent that any sexuality that is perceived as different from the dominant cis-gendered, heteropatriarchal norm is considered deviant. Non-normative sexualities continue to be viewed by society as detrimental to the health of the nation. Consequently, how one is perceived by the dominant culture continues to limit one's ability to thrive. Each chapter serves to analyze how one's perceived gender identity or sexuality can block access to economic opportunity. Queer, trans, spatial and intersectional theories form the base of the literary analyses. One of the contributors'goals is to present capitalism as it is intersectionally present in life, identity, and society. The authors studied in this collection come from the USA, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and the Southern Cone of Latin America.

A horror-story history of capitalism and its relationship to the haunted and the gothic, and a manifesto of Gothic Marxism, which finds revolutionary hope in the nightmare of modernity.What does it mean to see horror in capitalism? What can horror tell us about the state and nature of capitalism?Blending film criticism, cultural theory, and philosophy, Capitalism: A Horror Story examines literature, film, and philosophy, from Frankenstein to contemporary cinema, delving into the socio-political function of the monster, the haunted nature of the digital world, and the inescapable horror of contemporary capitalist politics.Revitalizing the tradition of Romantic anticapitalism and offering a “dark way of being red”, Capitalism: A Horror Story argues for a Gothic Marxism, showing how we can find revolutionary hope in horror- a site of monstrous becoming that opens the door to a Utopian future.

Misrecognitions mounts a vigorous defense of the labyrinthine plotting of Victorian novels, notorious for their implausible concluding revelations and coincidences. Critics have long decried Victorian recognition scenes—the reunions and retroactive discoveries of identity that too conveniently bring the story to a close—as regrettable contrivances. Ben Parker counters this view by showing how these recognition scenes offer a critique of the social and economic misrecognitions at work in nineteenth-century capitalism. Through a meticulous analysis of novels by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Henry James, as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, Misrecognitions tracks how the Victorian novel translates the financialized abstractions of capital into dramas of buried secrets and disguised relations. Drawing on Karl Marx's account of commodity fetishism and reification, Parker contends that, by configuring capital as an enigma to be unveiled, Victorian recognition scenes dramatize the inversions of agency and temporality that are repressed in capitalist production. In plotting capital as an agent of opacity and misdirection, Victorian novels and their characteristic dialectic of illusion and illumination reveal the plot hole in capitalism itself.

Reads canonical works of modern drama in relation to the economic ideas of their era Emerging amid the turbulent rise of market finance and wider socioeconomic changes, modern drama enacted vital critiques of art and life under capitalism. Alisa Zhulina shows how fin-de-siècle playwrights such as Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Anton Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, and Gerhart Hauptmann interrogated the meaning of this newly coined economic concept. Acutely aware of their complicity in the system they sought to challenge, these playwrights staged economic questions as moral and political concerns, using their plays to explore the theories of Adam Smith, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Max Weber, and others within the boundaries of bourgeois theater. Theater of Capital: Modern Drama and Economic Life reveals the prescient and unsettling visions of life in a new financial and societal reality in now-canonical plays such as A Doll's House, Miss Julie, and The Cherry Orchard, as well as in lesser-known and long-overlooked works. This wide-ranging study prompts us to reevaluate modern drama and its legacy for the urgent economic and political questions that haunt our present moment.

Virginia Woolf and Capitalism explores Woolf's engagement with and critiques of capitalism throughout her life, arguing for its central importance in our understanding of her as an author, activist and publisher. Galvanised by existing scholarship on the place of economics, class, gender and empire in Woolf's writing, this collection draws attention to her thinking about history, labour and economics and gives space for understandings of Woolf in the context of our own late-capitalist moment. Chapters by leading and emerging scholars range across Woolf's oeuvre in all its generic diversity, from her earliest short fiction and Night and Day to Three Guineas and Between the Acts, showcasing a range of critical approaches from the archival to the creative to the pedagogical. This collection demonstrates how productive and provocative thinking about Woolf's fiction and non-fiction through the lens of capitalism can be for Woolf scholars.

This book studies sugarcane monoculture, the dominant form of cultivation in the colonial Caribbean, in the later 1600s and 1700s up to the Haitian Revolution. Researching travel literature, plantation manuals, Georgic poetry, letters, and political proclamations, this book interprets texts by Richard Ligon, Henry Drax, James Grainger, Janet Schaw, and Toussaint Louverture.As the first extended investigation into its topic, this book reads colonial Caribbean monoculture as the conjunction of racial capitalism and agrarian capitalism in the tropics. Its eco-Marxist perspective highlights the dual exploitation of the soil and of enslaved agricultural producers under the plantation regime, thereby extending Marxist analysis to the early colonial Caribbean. By focusing on textual form (in literary and non-literary texts alike), this study discloses the bearing of monoculture on contemporary writers'thoughts. In the process, it emphasizes the significance of a literary tradition that, despite its ideological importance, is frequently neglected in (postcolonial) literary studies and the environmental humanities.Located at a crossroads of disciplines and perspectives, this study will be of interest to literary/cultural critics and historians working in the early Americas and in Atlantic studies, to students and scholars of agriculture, colonialism, and (racial) capitalism, to Marxists and postcolonial critics, and to those working in the environmental humanities and in Global South studies.

¿Para qué sirve leer novelas? recupera la potencia de la ficción para comprender el mundo que habitamos y activar prácticas de vida una vez que cerramos los libros. Alejandra Laera elige un conjunto de novelas argentinas del siglo xxi y explora sus conexiones con el capitalismo contemporáneo. En medio de una crisis de alcance global que se profundiza en las economías regionales, aumenta la precarización laboral y provoca amenazas socioambientales, ciertas novelas despliegan una imaginación narrativa amplia y diversa, cuyos protagonistas siempre buscan desafiar, resistir o lidiar con las asechanzas y las dificultades que se les presentan una y otra vez. Organizado alrededor del dinero, el trabajo y el tiempo, este libro trama una lectura original que va de los diarios novelados de Ricardo Piglia o Alan Pauls al anticapitalismo novelesco de María Sonia Cristoff; de los dilemas de los escritores ante el mercado narrados por Sergio Bizzio o Juan Becerra a los juegos temporales de Samanta Schweblin y Gabriela Cabezón Cámara; todo con el fin de reconquistar para el presente una magia perdida por medio de la ficción. La autora se pregunta:'Ante la desazón o el enceguecimiento frente al capitalismo, ¿qué puede tener para decirnos la literatura?'. El libro indaga este interrogante y sondea las propuestas narrativas que conectan críticamente a la novela con el descarnado capitalismo a través de la imaginación.

Featuring readings of contemporary utopian poetry and fiction from authors such as Juliana Spahr, Mohsin Hamid, Bong Joon-ho, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lidia Yukavitch, and Cory Doctorow, this book investigates the commons - a form of organisation based on collectivity, communalism and sharing - as a type of transition between capitalist precarity and crisis and anti-capitalist futures. Each of the texts under examination was written in opposition to a particular crisis of the capitalist present - inequality, political representation, mobility, and climate change - and develops a particular mode of utopian'commoning'.Through its examination of these writers, crises and texts, this book reaffirms the use of utopianism as a tool for generating and representing alternative futures for a world in the midst of ongoing planetary crisis.

If it is indeed impossible to think beyond capitalism, then capital has become reality. If global capitalism organizes reality through the stories it weaves, capital is (as strong as) its fictions. If capital is reality and capital is fiction, then reality as such is fiction as well. It is by reading this fiction for both patterns and inconsistencies that contemporary individuals can challenge global capital and unveil its hypocrisies; and it is by fighting fiction with fiction, i.e. projecting new realities – such as those in the post-millennial novels by William Gibson, Douglas Coupland, and Dave Eggers – that people can imagine the world anew.

In the early 19th century, a new social collective emerged out of impoverished artisans, urban rabble, wandering rural lower classes, bankrupt aristocrats and precarious intellectuals, one that would soon be called the proletariat. But this did not yet exist as a unified, homogeneous class with affiliated political parties. The motley appearance, the dreams and longings of these figures, torn from all economic certainties, found new forms of narration in romantic novellas, reportages, social-statistical studies, and monthly bulletins. But soon enough, these disorderly, violent, nostalgic, errant, and utopian figures were denigrated as reactionary and anarchic by the heads of the labour movement, since they did not fit into their grand linear vision of progress. In this book, Patrick Eiden-Offe tells their story, tracing the making of the proletariat in Vörmarz Germany (1815–1848) through the writings of figures like Ludwig Tieck, Moses Hess, Wilhelm Weitling, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Engels, Louise Otto-Peters, Ernst Willkomm, and Georg Büchner, and in so doing, revealing a striking similarity to the disorderly classes of today.

With Slavery, Capitalism, and Women's Literature, Kristin Allukian makes an important contribution to slavery and capitalism scholarship by including the voices of some of the best-known nineteenth-century American women writers. Women's literature offers crucial and previously unconsidered economic insights into the relationship between slavery and capitalism, different from those we typically find in economics and economic histories. Allukian demonstrates that because women's imaginative and creative texts take the material-historical connection of slavery and capitalism as their starting point, they can be read for the more speculative extensions of that connection, extensions not possible to discover on a material-historical level. Indeed, Allukian contends, these authors and texts disclose unique economic insights, critiques, and theories in ways that are only possible through literary writing.The writers featured in this study—Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lucy Larcom, Harriet Jacobs, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper—published written accounts of the continuities between slavery and capitalism including between language and activism, accounting and sentimentalism, labor and technology, race and property, and inheritance and reparations. Their essays, novels, poems, and autobiographies provided forums to document data, stimulate debate, generate resistance, and imagine alternatives to the United States'developing capitalist economy, engined and engineered by slavery. Without their unique economic insights, the national narrative we tell about the relationship between slavery and capitalism is incomplete.

In The Feeling of Letting Die, Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism's death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows. Utilizing Achille Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term “necroeconomics,” positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism's death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat.

Undertaken at the interface of critical theory and world literature, Moments of Capital sets out to grasp the unity and heterogeneity of global capital in the postcolonial present. Eli Jelly-Schapiro argues that global capital is composed of three synchronous moments: primitive accumulation, expanded reproduction, and the'synthetic dispossession'facilitated by financialization and privatization. These moments correspond to distinct economic and political forms, and distinct strands of theory and fiction. Moments of Capital integrates various intellectual traditions—from multiple trajectories of Marxist thought, to Weberian inquiries into the'spirit'of capitalism, to anticolonial accounts of racial depredation—to reveal the concurrent interrelation of the three moments of capital. The book's literary readings, meanwhile, make vivid the uneven texture and experience of capitalist modernity at large. Analyzing formally and thematically diverse novels—works by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, Marlon James, Jennifer Egan, Eugene Lim, Rafael Chirbes, Neel Mukherjee, Rachel Kushner, and others—Jelly-Schapiro evinces the different patterns of feeling and consciousness that register, and hypothesize a way beyond, the contradictions of capital. This book develops a new conceptual key for the mapping of contemporary theory, world literature, and global capital itself.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) focuses on a basic paradox: why is it that the so-called “Spanish economic miracle” —a purportedly secular, rational, and technocratic process— was fictionally portrayed through providential narratives in which supernatural and extraordinary elements were often involved? In order to answer this question, this book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development. Beyond the narratives about progress, modernity, and consumer satisfaction on a global and national level, the cultural archives of the period offer intellectual findings about the expectations of a social majority who lived in the precariousness and who did not have sufficient income to acquire the consumer goods that were advertised. Through the scrutiny of interdisciplinary archives (literary texts, cinema, newsreels, comics, and journalistic sources, among other cultural artifacts), each chapter offers an analysis of the social imaginaries about the circulation and distribution of capital and resources in the period from 1950, when General Franco's government began to integrate into international markets and institutions following its agreements with the United States, to 1967, when the implementation of the First Development Plan (1964-1967) was completed.

The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation provides an account of the long arc of dispossession from the British Romantic period to today. Lenora Hanson glimpses histories of subsistence (such as reproductive labor, vagrancy and criminality, and unwaged labor) as figural ways of living that are superfluous—simultaneously more than enough to live and less than what is necessary for capitalism. Hanson treats rhetorical language as an archive of capital's accumulation through dispossession, in works by S.T. Coleridge, Edmund Burke, Mary Robinson, William Wordsworth, Benjamin Moseley, Joseph Priestley, and Alexander von Humboldt, as well as in contemporary film and critical theory. Reading riots through apostrophe, enclosure through anachronism, superstition and witchcraft through tautology, and the paradoxical coincidence of subsistence living with industrialization, Hanson shows the figural to be a material record of the survival of non-capitalist forms of life within capitalism. But this survival is not always-already resistant to capitalism, nor are the origins of capital accumulation confined to the Romantic past. Hanson reveals rhetorical figure as entwined in deeply ambivalent ways with the circuitous, ongoing process of dispossession. Reading both historically and rhetorically, Hanson argues that rhetorical language records histories of dispossession and the racialized, gendered distribution of the labor of subsistence. Romanticism, they show, is more contemporary than ever.

‘Corporeal Battlegrounds'explores the depiction and critical potential of the entanglement of work and embodiment in contemporary realist U.S.-American novels. It argues that manifesting the elusive effects of contemporary capitalism in the figure of the laboring body allows for a critique of capitalism. The laboring body thus provides a gateway to understanding how power relations are perpetuated by the work we engage in and to revealing the inherent logic of capitalism. To provide a comprehensive view, each larger section examines one aspect of contemporary capitalism in conversation with a novel: social acceleration, digitalization, financialization, and 24/7 capitalism. These sections question how the novels approach the representability of economic relations and how the depiction of the laboring body functions to open up an area of tension to criticize the link between the laboring body, economic participation, and the perception of failure and success.

Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin's paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political value. By drawing on an alternative genealogy of Marxist criticism, this book presents a non-hierarchical understanding of the estrangement connecting all varieties of speculative fiction, outlining the political potential shared across the spectrum of speculative fiction, along with the specific narrative strategies by which it critically engages with its historical context of production. This study's main point of contention is that speculative fiction performs an estrangement effect on historical reality that can potentially render visible the role of fantasies in the organisation of capitalist social practice. This narrative effect enables an estranged perspective by which the novel interprets and conceptualises historical reality ina totalising manner.

At the outset of Marx for Cats, Leigh Claire La Berge declares that “all history is the history of cat struggle.” Revising the medieval bestiary form to meet Marxist critique, La Berge follows feline footprints through Western economic history to reveal an animality at the heart of Marxism. She draws on a twelve-hundred-year arc spanning capitalism's feudal prehistory, its colonialist and imperialist ages, the bourgeois revolutions that supported capitalism, and the communist revolutions that opposed it to outline how cats have long been understood as creatures of economic critique and liberatory possibility. By attending to the repeated archival appearance of lions, tigers, wildcats, and “sabo-tabbies,” La Berge argues that felines are central to how Marxists have imagined the economy, and by asking what humans and animals owe each other in a moment of ecological crisis, La Berge joins current debates about the need for and possibility of eco-socialism. In this playful and generously illustrated radical bestiary, La Berge demonstrates that class struggle is ultimately an interspecies collaboration.

In nineteenth-century Britain, the word queer was associated not only with same-sex desire but also with irregular forms of financial association and trust. Queer Economic Dissonance and Victorian Literature centers this forgotten facet of queer by recovering an alternative economic narrative of the Victorian period: one of economic excess, waste, debt, and downward mobility. Drawing on insights from intersectional queer theory and economic literary criticism, as well as astute readings of works by Charles Dickens, Charlotte Brontë, Mary Seacole, George Eliot, and Oscar Wilde, Meg Dobbins argues that eccentric economic figures like Black entrepreneurs, childless widows, and working-class benefactors represent sites of queerness––forms of economic desire, identity, strategy, or relation that become sites of friction within the developing social and institutional norms of nineteenth-century capitalism. Dobbins argues that Victorian authors document the everyday economic struggles of those cast aside, left behind, and fundamentally transfigured by modern capitalism. Rather than rejecting capitalist ideology, these authors queer socioeconomic norms, shedding light on the provocative ways Victorians made capitalism livable, and even pleasurable. In this way, Queer Economic Dissonance rearticulates the link between erotic and economic forms of dissonance in capitalist society.

Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding'of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural'experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist', the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western'in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.

Über die Epochen hinweg haben sich literarische Werke und Genres explizit oder implizit mit dem Kapitalismus auseinandergesetzt. Doch gerade die vergangenen Jahrzehnte, in welchen der Kapitalismus nach Mark Fisher zum ausweglosen Vorstellungshorizont avanciert ist, zeugen von einer vermehrten Infragestellung des Kapitalismus in der literarischen Produktion sowie der Literaturwissenschaft. Vor diesem Hintergrund vereint der interdisziplinäre Sammelband Beiträge aus der Germanistik, Romanistik, Amerikanistik und Anglistik, die den Blick auf verschiedene zeitgenössische Manifestationen des globalen Kapitalismus und deren literarische oder filmische Repräsentationen richten.

Walt Whitman and His Caribbean Interlocutors: José Martí, C.L.R. James, and Pedro Mir explores the writings of Whitman (1819-1892) and of three Caribbean authors who engaged with them: the Cuban poet, essayist and revolutionary José Martí (1853-1895); the Trinidadian activist, historian and cultural critic C.L.R. James (1901-1989), and the Dominican poet Pedro Mir (1913-2000). Whitman and his Caribbean interlocutors are discussed against the background of the contradictions of capitalist modernity, as exemplified by the United States between the 1840s and the 1940s. Marx's exploration of the liberating and oppressive dimensions of capitalist expansion frames the discussion of each author and of Martí's, James's and Mir's responses to Whitman and, more generally, to North American capitalist and industrial civilisation and its imperial projections.

This book is an original contribution to literary geography and commentaries on the work of David Ireland. It plots the relationship between the spaces and places of 1970s Australian capitalism as it evolves through Ireland's 1971 Miles Franklin prize-winning novel The Unknown Industrial Prisoner. In particular, the book theorises the relationship between space and place in literature through two highly innovative arguments: a focus on the spatial unconscious as a means to assess and track the spatiality of capitalism in the novel form; and the articulation of a regime of space through the perceived, conceived and lived constitution of space. Drawing together concepts from radical geography and structural Marxist literary theory, it explores the dominance of the regime of abstract space in the Australian context. The text also examines the nature and possibilities of place-based strategies of resistance, and concludes by suggesting opportunities for futureresearch and plotting the ways in which The Unknown Industrial Prisoner continues to speak to contemporary Australia.

Emerging at a moment of escalating colonial conflict between England and Ireland, the figure of the Irish Celt enjoyed a long and varied career in both English and Irish literature from the late Victorian era to World War II. While this figure assumes many forms and functions, T. J. Boynton argues that he is consistently cast as inherently resistant to capitalism. Beginning with an innovative reassessment of Matthew Arnold's The Study of Celtic Literature, from which the book also takes its title, Against the Despotism of Fact offers new readings of major works by writers such as Kipling, Conrad, Lawrence, Yeats, Joyce, and Beckett. In their writing, Boynton argues, the Irish Celt served as a transnational vehicle of modernist experimentation geared toward interrogating the imperial, social, and pop-cultural dimensions of capitalist modernity. Making a significant contribution to Irish studies, modernist studies, and postcolonial studies, Against the Despotism of Fact draws attention to not only the prevalence but also the critical potential of this fraught figure.

In Home Economics: Domestic Fraud in Victorian England, Rebecca Stern establishes fraud as a basic component of the Victorian popular imagination, key to its intimate, as well as corporate, systems of exchange. Although Victorian England is famous for revering the domestic realm as a sphere separate from the market and its concerns, actual households were hardly isolated havens of fiscal safety and innocence. Rather, the Victorian home was inevitably a marketplace, a site of purchase, exchange, and employment in which men and women hired or worked as servants, contracted marriages, managed children, and obtained furniture, clothing, food, and labor. Alongside the multiplication of joint-stock corporations and the rise of a credit-based economy, which dramatically increased fraud in the Victorian money market, the threat of swindling affected both actual household commerce and popular conceptions of ostensibly private, more emotive forms of exchange. Working with diverse primary material, including literature, legal cases, newspaper columns, illustrations, ballads, and pamphlets, Stern argues that the climate of fraud permeated Victorian popular ideologies about social transactions. Beyond providing a history of cases and categories of domestic deceit, Home Economics illustrates the diverse means by which Victorian culture engaged with, refuted, celebrated, represented, and consumed swindling in familial and other household relationships.

Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.

Ein'artistisches Ganzes'? - Zum rhetorischen, stilistischen und poetologischen Charakter von Marx` Hauptwerk. Das'Kapital'gehört zu den bekanntesten und wirkmächtigsten Texten der politischen Ökonomie und modernen Philosophie. Über den zahllosen Kontroversen um Marx` Hauptwerk wurde bislang jedoch vernachlässigt, wie sorgfältig und durchdacht dieses gestaltet ist, wie intensiv es sich auf literarische Texte bezieht und selbst immer wieder mit poetischen und stilistischen Mitteln wie Metaphern oder narrativen Einschüben arbeitet und wie sehr der theoretische Ansatz des'Kapitals'von der Darstellungsweise dieses Textes abhängt. In 14 Beiträgen wird die Frage nach der Poetik und Ästhetik des'Kapitals'aus verschiedenen Perspektiven untersucht: vom Zusammenhang von Rhetorik, Polemik und Kritik über das Wechselspiel von Darstellung und Wissen, die Rolle von Erzählungen bis zum Verhältnis des'Kapitals'zur Erzählliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts, bevor an den Beispielen von Sergej Eisenstein und Alexander Kluge abschließend zwei produktive Rezeptionen von Marx` Text im 20. Jahrhundert betrachtet werden.

Russia's Capitalist Realism examines how the literary tradition that produced the great works of Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Anton Chekhov responded to the dangers and possibilities posed by Russia's industrial revolution. During Russia's first tumultuous transition to capitalism, social problems became issues of literary form for writers trying to make sense of economic change. The new environments created by industry, such as giant factories and mills, demanded some kind of response from writers but defied all existing forms of language. This book recovers the rich and lively public discourse of this volatile historical period, which Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov transformed into some of the world's greatest works of literature. Russia's Capitalist Realism will appeal to readers interested in nineteenth‑century Russian literature and history, the relationship between capitalism and literary form, and theories of the novel.

Aesthetic objects, crafted as poetic reflections of the contradictory worlds that they inhabit, are simultaneously theorized and theorizing. In Capital in the Mirror, eminent critical theorists explore the aesthetic dimension for reflective visions of capital that are difficult to obtain through even the most rigorous statistical analyses. Chapters address inequality, alienation, ideology, warfare, and other problems of contemporary capitalism through the cultural prisms of Herman Melville, Thomas Mann, Charles Dickens, J. W. Goethe, Friedrich Hölderlin, Walt Whitman, Bertolt Brecht, and science-fiction cinema. Famous narrative elements in their works, such as Ahab's pursuit of the white whale in Melville's Moby-Dick, demonic production and perverse desire in Mann's Doctor Faustus, socially electrified bodies of Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and dystopian projections of current sci-fi cinema, are theorized as stylistically distorted reflections of social life within capital. The authors reveal theoretical powers latent within these condensed images that prefigure the dark dynamics of capitalism. Focusing on dark images of domination and also prophetic images of transformation, the book points the way toward emancipation, social regeneration, and human flourishing.

How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies?Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells the tale of bankruptcy and financial failure, of people losing everything and ending up in debtor's prison, of inheritances lost and daughters left orphaned and poor. In Downward Mobility, Katherine Binhammer argues that these stories of ruin are not simple tales about the losers of capitalism but narratives that help manage speculation of capital's inevitable collapse.Bringing together contemporary critical finance studies with eighteenth-century literary history, Binhammer demonstrates the centrality of the myth of downward mobility to the cultural history of capitalism—and to the emergence of the novel in Britain. Deftly weaving economic history and formal analysis, Binhammer reveals how capitalism requires the novel's complex techniques to render infinite economic growth imaginable. She also explains why the novel's signature formal developments owe their narrative dynamics to the contradictions within capital's form. Combining new archival research on the history of debt with original readings of sentimental novels, including Frances Burney's Cecilia and Camilla, Sarah Fielding's David Simple, and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield, Downward Mobility registers the value of literary narrative in interpreting the complex sequences behind financial capitalism, especially the belief in infinite growth that has led to current environmental crises. An audacious epilogue arms humanists with the argument that, in order to save the planet from unsustainable growth, we need to read more novels.

In Austrian economic thought, “human action” guides all social and cultural experience. For both the real world and for fictional texts, this starting point can illuminate literature in new ways and offer valuable insight for literary critics who have previously been beholden to Marxism and other anti-capitalist perspectives. In Re-Reading Economics in Literature: A Capitalist Critical Perspective, Matt Spivey posits that in its relationship to literature, Austrian economic criticism entails a methodology that embraces the following: 1) an analytical reading that promotes both the individual artist as the creator of literature and the individual reader as the consumer of literature; 2) an understanding of the entrepreneurial quality of literature, that capitalism is a system that embraces creativity and evolution in the marketplace; and 3) a recognition of subjective value as fundamental to human choice and action, both in art and in the real world. In addition to the study of the individual, Spivey also incorporates the concepts of business cycles, government intervention, social dynamics, and technological evolution in his analysis. Scholars of literary studies and economics will find this book particularly useful.

The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major function of the American capitalist engine, presenting various formulations of American capitalism from the perspective of economists, social scientists, and literary critics. Focusing on three narratives—fictitious capital, working fictions, and the economic novel—the volume questions whether these three types of fiction can be linked under the sign of capitalism. This collection seeks to illustrate the American economy's dependence on fictitiousness, America's ideological fictions, and the nation's creative literary fiction. In relation to what the credit and banking crisis of 2007–2008 exposed about the “unreal” base of the economy, the volume concludes with a call to recognize the economic humanities, arguing that American fiction and American literary studies can provide a useful mirror for economists.

Wie lässt sich der Kapitalismus erzählen? Eine Studie über Literatur, Wissen und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Der literarische Realismus des 19. Jahrhunderts begreift die zeitgenössische Gesellschaft als grundsätzlich unkenntliche und intransparente Wirklichkeit. Waren und Geld, Kapital und Profit werden als Chiffren sozialer Verhältnisse konzipiert, deren Bedeutung nicht auf der Hand liegt, sondern entschlüsselt werden muss. Dabei stößt die Literatur auf die Probleme und Streitfragen der politischen Ökonomie, deren Wissensproduktion zum Material des Erzählens wird. Till Breyer rekonstruiert die wechselseitigen Bezüge von sozialen Verwerfungen, ökonomischem Wissen und realistischem Erzählen und stellt dabei die Begriffe der Produktion, des Verkehrs, des Kapitals und der Krise in den Mittelpunkt. Entlang eines literatur- und diskursgeschichtlichen Materials, das von Raabe und Dickens über Marx und Engels, Keller und Gaskell zu den Spätwerken Fontanes und Zolas führt, entfaltet die Studie den kulturellen Prozess, in dem das 19. Jahrhundert die Krisendynamik der Moderne zu deuten versucht.

First published in 1971, How to Read Donald Duck shocked readers by revealing how capitalist ideology operates in our most beloved cartoons. Having survived bonfires, impounding and being dumped into the ocean by the Chilean army, this controversial book is once again back on our shelves. Written and published during the blossoming of Salvador Allende's revolutionary socialism, the book examines how Disney comics not only reflect capitalist ideology, but are active agents working in this ideology's favour. Focusing on the hapless mice and ducks of Disney, curiously parentless, marginalised and always short of cash, Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart expose how these characters established hegemonic ideas about capital, race, gender and the relationship between developed countries and the Third World. A devastating indictment of a media giant, a document of twentieth-century political upheaval, and a reminder of the dark undercurrent of pop culture, How to Read Donald Duck is once again available, together with a new introduction by Ariel Dorfman.