The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction

Paul Crosthwaite is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

• Introduction: neoliberalism, financialization, and the contemporary literary marketplace; Part I. The Emergence of Market Metafiction: 1. Market metafiction and the varieties of postmodernism; Part II. The Phantasmagorias of Contemporary Finance: 2. Trading in the as if: fiduciary exchangeability and supernatural financial fiction; 3. 'The occult logic of 'market forces'': Iain Sinclair's post-Big Bang London; Part III. The Market Knows: 4. The price is right: market epistemology, narrative totality, and the 'big novel'; 5. Fully reflecting: knowing the mind of the market in DeLillo and Kunzru; 6. Putting everything on the table: markets and material conditions in twenty-first-century fiction; 7. Between autonomy and heteronomy: exchanging capital in Zink, Cohen, and Heti; Coda: basic income, or, why Barbara Browning's The Gift is not a gift.

'Paul Crosthwaite engages deeply and thoughtfully with the fields of economics and economic history to produce a study that is genuinely interdisciplinary in scope. The book reconfigures economic concepts as formal strategies to great effect, generating highly original pairings and readings that are both insightful and persuasive. The book is superbly polished in its execution and a pleasure to read.' Janice Ho, University of Colorado