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List of contents
Introduction: Fictions of Celebrity and the Markets for Modernism
Chapter One: Signature to Brand: Martin Amis’s Negotiations with Literary Celebrity
Chapter Two: “To invent a literature”: Ian McEwan’s Commercial Modernism
Chapter Three: From Modernism to Postcolonial Inc.: Authorizing Salman Rushdie
Chapter Four: What the Public Wants: Prize Culture and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Aesthetic of Disillusionment
Chapter Five: Zadie Smith, Inauthenticity, and the Ends of Multicultural Modernism
Chapter Six: Valuing the Marginal, or, How Eimear McBride and Anna Burns Reframe Irish Modernism
Bibliography
About the author
Carey Mickalites is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Memphis, USA. He is the author of Modernism and Market Fantasy: British Fictions of Capital, 1910 – 1939 (2012), as well as a number of articles on modernist and contemporary literature. He regularly teaches courses and seminars on modernism, contemporary British fiction, colonial and postcolonial literature, and literary and cultural theory.
Summary
Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors like Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Eimear McBride and Anna Burns position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital in the lucrative market for literary fiction, this book also shows how the corporate conditions of marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation.
It contributes to a growing body of criticism focused on contemporary literature as a field in which the formal and stylistic experimentation that came to define a canon of early 20th-century modernism has been renewed, contested, and revised. Other critics have celebrated these renewals, variously arguing that contemporary literature picks up on modernism’s unfinished aesthetic revolutions in ways that have expanded the imaginative possibilities for fiction and revived questions of literary autonomy in the wake of postmodern nihilism. While this is a compelling thesis, and one that rightly questions an artificial and problematic periodization that still lingers in academic criticism, those approaches generally fail to address the material conditions that structure literary production and the generation of cultural capital, whether in the historical development of modernism or its contemporary permutations. This book addresses this absence by proposing a materialist history of modernism’s afterlives.
Foreword
Arguing that contemporary celebrity authors position their work and public personae within a received modernist canon to claim and monetize its cultural capital, this book also shows how marketing and branding have redefined older models of literary influence and innovation.
