edited by Liam Kennedy and Stephen Shapiro
Dartmouth College Press, 2019
Paper: 978-1-5126-0361-3 | Cloth: 978-1-5126-0360-6 | eISBN: 978-1-5126-0362-0
Library of Congress Classification PS231.N46N46 2019
Dewey Decimal Classification 810.93581

ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Please Does it make sense to speak of an “American” literature in neoliberal times? Can literature function as either a neutral category or a privileged narrative of national imagination in a time when paradigms of the nation-state and of liberal capitalism are undergoing a prolonged shift? In the United States, as elsewhere, the association between the nation-state, liberal capitalism, and literary form has a long history, reflecting determinate relations between writer and reader within an imagined national community. As this community loses its symbolic efficiency in the age of neoliberal capital, the boundaries and possibilities of literary production and representation shift.

This collection of essays examines how American literature both models and interrogates the neoliberal present. Has literary realism been exhausted as a narrative form? Can contemporary literature still imagine either the end of capitalism or an alternative to it?fill in marketing copy