Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism

Jo Ann Cavallo is Professor of Italian at Columbia University, USA. She has published widely on Italian literature and culture, especially Renaissance chivalric epic and popular performance traditions. For the past decade, she has also brought a libertarian perspective to Italian studies through her publications on Marco Polo, Machiavelli, Renaissance fiction, chivalric epic, and Sicilian puppet theater.

“Many of the great stories take on renewed life—Shakespeare’s plays, especially, but also Jonson’s Alchemist, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pinocchio, H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds (which gets a rather sinister undertone of the Technostate), and even, with astonishing effrontery, Hesse’s Siddhartha. Likewise, pop culture gets rousing re-readings … . Libertarian Literary and Media Criticism may be the seed of a more liberal and humane movement in literary and humanistic studies.” (Frederick Turner, Cosmos and Taxis, cosmosandtaxis.org, Vol. 13 (7-8), 2025) “My deepest gratitude to Jo Ann Cavallo for bringing this collection to my attention. I heartily recommend it to my readers!” (Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Notablog, notablog.net, May 16, 2025)

• Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: Paul Cantor on Shakespeare’s Rome.- Chapter 3: Why Do You Think That’s Funny?: The Theory of Comedy and the Theory of Valuation.- Chapter 4: A Perfect Ambodexter”: The Roaring Girl and Commercial Self-Fashioning.- Chapter 5: The Alchemy of the Free Market in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist.- Chapter 6: War and Peace as an Important Contribution to Economics and Methodological Individualism.- Chapter 7: A Wooden Boy and a Lesson in Free Market Economics: How Pinocchio Becomes an Entrepreneur.- Chapter 8: This moral monster state”: Modern Utopianism, Emergent Order, and H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds .- Chapter 9: The Nearly Invisible Hand: An Austrian Approach to Teaching Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha.- Chapter 10: Scrooge McDuck: Caricature or Manifesto of the American Capitalist?.- Chapter 11: The Big Screen Takes on the Financial Crisis: An Exploration of Four Films (2011-2015).- Chapter 12: First Principles on the Final Frontier: Economic Foundations of Science Fiction Television.- Chapter 13: The Big Sky on the Small Screen: Austrian Economics in the Yellowstone Universe.- Chapter 14: Undercover Boss: Do We Need a Kinder, Gentler Capitalism?.