The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First-Century Literature and Culture Series

In the twenty-first century, leading publishers are under intense pressure from their conglomerate owners and shareholders to generate growth and profits. This book shows how these pressures have transformed the contemporary novel. Paul Crosthwaite argues that recent British and American authors have internalized the market logics of the financial sector and book trade, resulting in the production of works of 'market metafiction' in which authors reflect obsessively on their writing's positioning in the literary marketplace. The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction reveals the entanglement of fictional narrative and market dynamics to be the central phenomenon of contemporary literary culture. It engages with work by key authors including Iain Sinclair, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis, Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Anne Billson, Hari Kunzru, Barbara Browning, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Joshua Cohen, Sheila Heti, and Garth Risk Hallberg.

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