Commodities and Literature

Sudesh Mishra has received an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry, an Asialink Residency in India, the Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara Fellowship (Otago University) and an Erskine Canterbury Fellowship (Canterbury University). He was awarded a New Horizons Fellowship (Tubingen University) for 2024–2025. Caitlin Vandertop is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She was previously based at the University of the South Pacific and the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth Century Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

• List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; Reading Commodities: An Introduction Caitlin Vandertop and Sudesh Mishra; Part I. Origins: Commodity Fictions: 1. Tea and the silk roads of world literature Wen-chin Ouyang; 2. The travels of texts and coffee in early modern culture Natalya Din-Kariuki; 3. Fossil fuels and the fiction of extraction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; 4. (Post)colonial books as commodity and anti-commodity Russell West-Pavlov; Part II. Developments: Commodity Worlds: 5. The commodity frontiers of world-literature: coal and soy Michael Niblett; 6. The devil's metal: tin and the ecologies of commodity criticism Chris Campbell; 7. Commodifying care: migrant literature and materialist feminism Kate Houlden; 8. Kinship and indigenous anti-commodities Artemis Caine and Megan Kuster; Part III. Applications: Commodity Genres: 9. Sugar: literature's bitter, bitter commodity Sudesh Mishra; 10. The (In)significance of rum Jennifer P. Nesbitt; 11. Opium's imperial intimacies Julia Kuehn; 12. Guano and the fictions of fertile islands Caitlin Vandertop; 13. Water in world literature Bonnie Etherington; 14. From Napoleon to MacArthur: the story of SPAM Anurag Subramani; 15. Oil, commodity frontiers and the materials of the road novel Myka Tucker-Abramson; 16. Lithium in the web of life Kate Montague.