World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent

Sharae Deckard is Lecturer in World Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. Her recent publications include Marxism, Postcolonial Studies and the Future of Critique (co-edited with Rashmi Varma); Paradise Discourse, Imperialism and Globalization; and special issues of Ariel and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing on world literature.Stephen Shapiro is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. His most recent publications include Pentecostal Modernism: Lovecraft, Los Angeles and World-Systems Culture and Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature (co-edited with Liam Kennedy).

“Readers primarily trained in literary studies will find the chapters accessible, with many focusing on how elements of narrative … reify or intimate a resistance to the excesses of neo-liberalism. … the book’s nuanced commentaries on the ever-pernicious effects of capital, in an age where culture itself reproduces the inequalities of capital accumulation, reveals the limitations of locating literary studies solely within the realm of cultural production.” (Ann Ang, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, November 1, 2020)

• 1. World-Culture and the Neoliberal World-System: An Introduction; Sharae Deckard and Stephen Shapiro.- 2. The Long 1970s: Neoliberalism, Narrative Form, and Hegemonic Crisis in the work of Marlon James and Paulo Lins; Michael Niblett.- 3. From “Section 936” to “Junk”: Neoliberalism, Ecology and Puerto Rican Literature; Kerstin Oloff.- 4. Mont Neoliberal Periodization: The Mexican “Democratic Transition,” from Austrian Libertarianism to the “War on Drugs”; Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado.- 5. Cricket’s Neoliberal Narratives: Or the World of Competitive Accumulation and Sporting Spirit in Contemporary Cricket Fiction; Claire Westall.- 6. Keeping it Real: Literary Impersonality under Neoliberalism; Daniel Hartley.- 7. The Cultural Regulation of Neoliberal Capitalism; Mathias Nilges.- 8. Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite:  Monetised War, Militarised Money–a Narrative Poetics for the Closing of an American Century; Richard Godden.- 9. A Bubble in the Vein: Suicide, Community and the Rejection of Neoliberalism in Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life and Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows; Amy Rushton.- 10. Futures, Inc.: Fiction and Intellectual Property in the (South) African Renaissance; Matthew Eatough.- 11. Trains, Stone and Energetics: African Resource Culture and the Neoliberal World-Ecology; Sharae Deckard.