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An enlarged edition to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of John Guillory's formative text on the literary canon. Since its publication in 1993, John Guillory's Cultural Capital has been a signal text for understanding the codification and uses of the literary canon. Cultural Capital reconsiders the social basis for aesthetic judgment and exposes the unequal distribution of symbolic and linguistic knowledge on which culture has long been based. Drawing from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups and more as a question of the distribution of cultural capital in schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing. Now, as the crisis of the canon has evolved into the so-called crisis of the humanities, Guillory's groundbreaking, incisive work has never been more urgent. As scholar and critic Merve Emre writes in her introduction to this enlarged edition: “Exclusion, selection, reflection, representation—these are the terms on which the canon wars of the last century were fought, and the terms that continue to inform debates about, for instance, decolonizing the curriculum and the rhetoric of antiracist pedagogy.”

In these innovative essays on poetry and capitalism, collected over the last fifteen years, Christopher Nealon shines a light on the upsurge of anticapitalist poetry since the turn of the century, and develops fresh ways of thinking about how capitalist society shapes the reading and the writing of all poetry, whatever its political orientation. Breaking from half a century of postmodernist readings of poetry, and bypassing the false divide between formalist and historicist criticism, these essays chart a path toward a new Marxist poetics.

Financial Gothic explores the persistent concern of American Gothic literature with finance – and finance as having always been a gothic phenomenon – from 1880 to the present day. The study reads Frankensteinian monsters, haunted houses, vampires and zombies in American literature and film as cultural responses to such twentieth and twenty-first century financial phenomena as the 1929 Wall Street Crash, post-war housing debt, financial deregulation, and the 2008 Credit Crunch. Consideration is also given to the pre-existing consensus on racial readings of American gothic, and how these interpretations of the slave trade can be expanded upon in conversation with their financial contexts. Drawing on contemporary insights into financialised understandings of economics within the humanities, new analysis of finance as an inherently gothic phenomenon, and archival work completed on the Library of Congress's Black History Collection, Financial Gothic highlights an as-yet-unrecognised dimension of haunting and monstrosity within American gothic fiction.

This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth-century capitalism.There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s—is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant-garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, caricature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin-de-siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker's cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women's writing, punk culture, and punk feminism's reimagining of late capitalism.This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women's studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth-century American literature.

Étienne Balibar writes that today we are at the end of capitalism. This is not because capitalism has run its course or has met an irresistible force, but because there can be no purer form of capitalism than the one we have today. Taking seriously the idea that this strain of capitalism has not only seized the urban environment but is the urban environment, works by Michael Moorcock, Iain Sinclair, Penelope Lively, Peter Ackroyd, and J.G. Ballard are read as representative of a loosely allied group of London writers who have anticipated, critiqued, and offered up various avenues of resistance to the deleterious effects of this most vigorous strain of capitalism.Writing on the city by charting a politics of reconnection to the real that necessarily unsettles the epistemological and ontological ground upon which both modernity and capitalism sit, this stable of writers makes clear the ways in which the sheer materiality of the urban environment profoundly influences the being and thinking of individuals. In so doing, these writers produce works which when read together give the coordinates of an altermodernity that might just allow capitalism to reach its final conclusion.

In the late sixteenth through seventeenth centuries, England simultaneously developed a national market and a national literary culture. Writing at the Origin of Capitalism describes how economic change in early modern England created new patterns of textual production and circulation with lasting consequences for English literature. Synthesizing research in book and media history, including investigations of manuscript and print, with Marxist historical theory, this volume demonstrates that England's transition to capitalism had a decisive impact on techniques of writing, rates of literacy, and modes of reception, and, in turn, on the form and style of texts. Individual chapters discuss the impact of market integration on linguistic standardization and the rise of a uniform English prose; the growth of a popular literary market alongside a national market in cheap commodities; and the decline of literary patronage with the monarchy's loosening grip on trade regulation, among other subjects. Peddlers'routes and price integration, monopoly licenses and bills of exchange, all prove vital for understanding early modern English writing. Each chapter reveals how books and documents were embedded in wider economic processes, and as a result, how the origin of capitalism constituted a revolutionary event in the history of English literature.

This book examines how contemporary global novels by Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, Rana Dasgupta and Rachel Kushner have evolved new aesthetics to represent global economic and ecological crises. Paying close attention to the interrelations between postcolonial, world, and global literatures, this book argues that postcolonial literary studies cannot account for global crises that exceed the national and anti-colonial. Advocating an interdisciplinary framework informed by a synthesis of materialist literary theory with world-systems theory, combining Fredric Jameson and Georg Lukács with Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, this book examines how global literatures metabolise not only socioeconomic conditions, but also transformations in the world-ecology, and emergent developmental and epochal crises of 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.

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.

For as long as the United States owed its prosperity to a New World plantation complex, from colonial settlement until well into the twentieth century, the toxic practices associated with its permutations stimulated imaginary solutions to the contradiction with the nation's enlightenment ideals and republican ideology. Ideals of liberty, democracy, and individualism could not be separated from a history of forcible coercion, oligarchic power, and state-protected economic opportunism. While recent historical scholarship about the relation of capitalism to slavery explores the depths at which U.S. ascension was indebted to global plantation slave economies, John T. Matthews probes how exemplary works of literature represented the determination to deny the open secret of a national atrocity. Difficult truths were hidden in plain sight, allowing beholders at once to recognize and disavow knowledge they would not act on.What were the habits of mind that enabled free Americans to acknowledge what was intolerable yet act as if they did not? In what ways did non-slave-owning Americans imagine a relation to slavery that both admitted its iniquity and accepted its benefits? How did the reconfiguration of the plantation system after the Civil War elicit new literary forms for dealing with its perpetuation of racial injustice, expropriation of labor, and exploitation for profit of the land? Hidden in Plain Sight examines signal nineteenth-century works by Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Joel Chandler Harris to show how writers portrayed a nation founded on the unseen seen of slavery's capitalism.

Critics have traditionally maintained that capitalism's resurgence after the Second World War precipitated the transition from modernism to postmodernism. This revisionist account shows that modernism does not simply decline. By foregrounding phenomenological conceptions of bodily experience, Jason M. Baskin reveals modernism's ongoing vitality. Key postwar writers, critics and philosophers, including Elizabeth Bishop, Ezra Pound, Ralph Ellison and Raymond Williams, as well as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Theodor Adorno, developed an aesthetics of embodiment that adapted modernism to a new postwar landscape. Working across differences of race, gender, national and intellectual tradition, genre and form, Baskin contends that these authors used ordinary bodily experiences, such as perception, memory and laughter, to imagine modes of common being and purpose that were otherwise unavailable in a postwar society dominated by liberal capitalism.

In the first half of the nineteenth century autobiography became, for the first time, an explicitly commercial genre. Drawing together quantitative data on the Victorian book market, insights from the business ledgers of Victorian publishers and close readings of mid-century novels, Sean Grass demonstrates the close links between these genres and broader Victorian textual and material cultures. This book offers fresh perspectives on major works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins and Charles Reade, while also featuring archival research that reveals the volume, diversity, and marketability of Victorian autobiographical texts for the first time. Grass presents life-writing not as a stand-alone genre, but as an integral part of a broader movement of literary, cultural, legal and economic practices through which the Victorians transformed identity into a textual object of capitalist exchange.

What is the value of literature? In this important new work, Thomas Docherty charts a new economic history of literary culture and its institutions in the modern age. From the literary patronage of the early modern period, through the colonial exploitation of the 18th and 19th centuries to the institutionalisation of “literature” in the neoliberal university of the 21st century, Literature and Capital explores the changing ways in which literary culture has both resisted and become complicit with exploitative economic notions of value. Drawing on the work of economic and political thinkers such as Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein, Edward Said and Raymond Williams, the book includes readings of work by a wide range of canonical authors from Shakespeare, Donne and Swift to Tolstoy, Woolf and Ishiguro.

In Racial Feelings, Jeffrey Santa Ana examines how Asian American narratives communicate and critique—to varying degrees—the emotions that power the perception of Asians as racially different. Santa Ana explores various forms of Asian American cultural production, ranging from literature and graphic narratives to film and advertising, to illuminate the connections between global economic relations and the emotions that shape aspirations for the good life. He illustrates his argument with examples including the destitute Filipino immigrant William Paulinha, in Han Ong's Fixer Chao, who targets his anger on the capitalist forces of objectification that racially exploit him, and Nan and Pingpin in Ha Jin's A Free Life, who seek happiness and belonging in America. Racial Feelings addresses how Asian Americans both resist and rely on stereotypes in their writing and art work. In addition, Santa Ana investigates how capitalism shapes and structures an emotional discourse that represents Asians as both economic exemplars and threats.

The Long 1980s could be summed up handily in the annals of U.S. cultural history with the enduring markers of Ronald Reagan's presidency, Oliver Stone's film Wall Street, and Dire Straits's hit single'Money for Nothing.'Despite their vast differences, each serves to underscore the confidence, jingoism, and optimism that powered the U.S. economy throughout the decade. Mining a wide range of literature, film, and financial print journalism, Scandals and Abstraction chronicles how American society's increasing concern with finance found expression in a large array of cultural materials that ultimately became synonymous with postmodernism. The ever-present credit cards, monetary transactions, and ATMs in Don De Lillo's White Noise open this study as they serve as touchstones for its protagonist's sense of white masculinity and ground the novel's narrative form. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities and Oliver Stone's Wall Street animate a subsequent chapter, as each is considered in light of the 1987 stock market crash and held up as a harbinger of a radical new realism that claimed a narrative monopoly on representing an emergent financial era. These works give way to the pornographic excess and violence of Bret Easton Ellis's epochal American Psycho, which is read alongside the popular 1980s genre of the financial autobiography. With a series of trenchant readings, La Berge argues that Ellis's novel can be best understood when examined alongside Ivan Boesky's Merger Mania, Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, and T. Boone Pickens's Boone. A look at Jane Smiley's Good Faith and its plot surrounding the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, concludes the study, and considers how financial reportage became a template for much of our current writing about of finance. Drawing on a diverse archive of novels, films, autobiographies, and journalism, Scandals and Abstraction provides a timely study of the economy's influence on fiction, and outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism became more canonical, realism became more postmodern, and finance became a distinct cultural object.

Branded products opened a new poetological playing field for literature. This study shows how the works of E. Edel, T. Mann, I. Keun, W. Koeppen, and C. Kracht reflected the material, semiological, and cultural theory aspects of consumer culture and transformed them into literary devices. The volume considers a range of issues, from product catalogs to fetishization, including capitalist circulation processes and the fascination with surface. It uses close readings to open the reader's eyes to the cultural poetological dimension in literary texts and the conditions of culture in capitalism.

In this highly original reexamination of North American poetry in English from Ezra Pound to the present day, Christopher Nealon demonstrates that the most vital writing of the period is deeply concerned with capitalism. This focus is not exclusive to the work of left-wing poets: the problem of capitalism's effect on individuals, communities, and cultures is central to a wide variety of poetry, across a range of political and aesthetic orientations. Indeed, Nealon asserts, capitalism is the material out of which poetry in English has been created over the last century.Much as poets of previous ages continually examined topics such as the deeds of King Arthur or the history of Troy, poets as diverse as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Claudia Rankine have taken as their “matter” the dynamics and impact of capitalism—not least its tendency to generate economic and political turmoil. Nealon argues persuasively that poets'attention to the matter of capital has created a corresponding notion of poetry as a kind of textual matter, capable of dispersal, retrieval, and disguise in times of crisis. Offering fresh readings of canonical poets from W. H. Auden to Adrienne Rich, as well as interpretations of younger writers like Kevin Davies, The Matter of Capital reorients our understanding of the central poetic project of the last century.

Exit Capitalism explores a new path for cultural studies and re-examines key moments of British cultural and literary history. Simon During argues that the long and liberating journey towards democratic state capitalism has led to an unhappy dead-end from which there is no imaginable exit.

The politicised interpretation of literature has relied on models of economic and social structures that oscillate between idealized subversion and market fatalism. Current anthropological discussions of mixed gift and commodity economies and the segmented politics of house societies offer solutions to this problem and suggest invaluable new directions for literary studies. Modernist Goods uses recent discussions of gift and house practices to counter an influential revisionist trend in modernist studies, a trend that sees the capitalist marketplace and its public sphere as the uniquely determining institutional structures in modern arts and culture.Glenn Willmott argues that a political unconscious forged by the widespread marginalisation of pre-capitalist institutions comes to the fore in modernist primitivism. Such primitivism, he insists, is not superficially exoticist or simply appropriative of the cultural heritage of others. Rather, it is at once parodic and authentic, and often, in the language of Julia Kristeva, abject. Modernist Goods examines such writers as Yeats, Conrad, Eliot, Woolf, Beckett, H.D., and Joyce to uncover what the author views as their displaced aboriginality and to investigate the relationship between literary modernism and aboriginal modernity. By bringing current anthropological developments to literary studies, it aims to rethink the economic commitments of modernist literature and their political significance.

The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.

John Guillory challenges the most fundamental premises of the canon debate by resituating the problem of canon formation in an entirely new theoretical framework. The result is a book that promises to recast not only the debate about the literary curriculum but also the controversy over'multiculturalism'and the current'crisis of the humanities.'Employing concepts drawn from Pierre Bourdieu's sociology, Guillory argues that canon formation must be understood less as a question of the representation of social groups than as a question of the distribution of'cultural capital'in the schools, which regulate access to literacy, to the practices of reading and writing.