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The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major function of the American capitalist engine, presenting various formulations of American capitalism from the perspective of economists, social scientists, and literary critics. Focusing on three narratives-fictitious capital, working fictions, and the economic novel-the volume questions whether these three types of fiction can be linked under the sign of capitalism. This collection seeks to illustrate the American economy's dependence on fictitiousness, America's ideological fictions, and the nation's creative literary fiction. In relation to what the credit and banking crisis of 2007-2008 exposed about the "unreal" base of the economy, the volume concludes with a call to recognize the economic humanities, arguing that American fiction and American literary studies can provide a useful mirror for economists.
List of contents
Chapter 1: The Fictions of American Capitalism: An Introduction, Jacques-Henri and Vincent Dussol.- Chapter 2: From Economics as Fiction to Fiction-Led Capitalism, Robert Boyer.- Chapter 3: Capitalism: Anticipating the Future Present, Jens Beckert.- Chapter 4: The Cultural Fix: Capital, Genre, and the Times of American Studies, Stephen Shapiro.- Chapter 5: "Tell me a Story": How American Capitalism Reinvents Itself through Storytelling, Marie-Christine Pauwels.- Chapter 6: The Boundless Economy: An Enduring Performative American Fiction?, Pierre Arnaud.- Chapter 7: American Entrepreneurship as Action Translated into Heuristic Discourse, Jacques-Henri Coste.- Chapter 8: The Woman Proprietor in Elizabeth Stuart Phelp's The Silent Partner: Social Reform Novel as Paradigm of John Stuart Mill's Liberal Political Economy, Julia McLeod.- Chapter 9: William Dean Howells and the Economic Novel: Heteronomy and Autonomy, Giullame Tanguy.- Chapter 10: The Theory of Monopoly and the Crafting of the Modern Epic: Frank Norris's The Octopus as Populist Drama?, Evelyne Payen-Varieras.- Chapter 11: Naturalism and Economic Calculability, Jason Douglas.- Chapter 12: Living on Paper: Disarticulating a Racialized Capitalism in Works by Richard Wright and Ann Petry, William Dow.- Chapter 13: Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged: "Laissez-Faire" Fiction, Vincent Dussol.- Chapter 14: "Building the clutter, widening the vacancy": Capitalism and Baroque in William Gaddis's JR, Jean-Louis Brunel.- Chapter 15: Money Narratives in Postmodern Novels by Paul Auster and Martin Amis, Sina Vatanpour.- Chapter 15: Revisiting Business History through Capitalist Fiction: The Glove-Making Business in Philip Roth's American Pastoral, Jacques-Henri Coste.- Chapter 16: Thomas Pynchon's Dumps: Subversive Developments, Benedicte Chorier-Fryd.- Chapter 18: Economic Humanities: Literature, Culture and Capitalism, Peter Knight.
About the author
Jacques-Henri Coste is Associate Professor of American Studies and Political Economy at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle - Paris 3, France. He is editor of
Les sociétés entrepreneuriales et les mondes Anglophones (2013) and coeditor of
The Crisis and Renewal of American Capitalism (2016).
Vincent Dussol is Associate Professor of American Literature at Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier 3, France. He has translated several American poets and is the editor of
The Epic Expands (2012) and co-editor of
Poésie-traduction-cinéma/Poetry-translation-film (2019).
