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Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opium, guano, oil and lithium, as they appear across a range of texts, periods, areas, and genres, the chapters bring together existing scholarship on literature and commodity culture with new perspectives from world-literary, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, the environmental and energy humanities, and book history. How, this volume asks, have commodities shaped literary forms and modes of reading? And how has literature engaged with the world-making trajectories and transformations of commodities?
List of contents
List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; Reading Commodities: An Introduction Caitlin Vandertop and Sudesh Mishra; Part I. Origins: Commodity Fictions: 1. Tea and the silk roads of world literature Wen-chin Ouyang; 2. The travels of texts and coffee in early modern culture Natalya Din-Kariuki; 3. Fossil fuels and the fiction of extraction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; 4. (Post)colonial books as commodity and anti-commodity Russell West-Pavlov; Part II. Developments: Commodity Worlds: 5. The commodity frontiers of world-literature: coal and soy Michael Niblett; 6. The devil's metal: tin and the ecologies of commodity criticism Chris Campbell; 7. Commodifying care: migrant literature and materialist feminism Kate Houlden; 8. Kinship and indigenous anti-commodities Artemis Caine and Megan Kuster; Part III. Applications: Commodity Genres: 9. Sugar: literature's bitter, bitter commodity Sudesh Mishra; 10. The (In)significance of rum Jennifer P. Nesbitt; 11. Opium's imperial intimacies Julia Kuehn; 12. Guano and the fictions of fertile islands Caitlin Vandertop; 13. Water in world literature Bonnie Etherington; 14. From Napoleon to MacArthur: the story of SPAM Anurag Subramani; 15. Oil, commodity frontiers and the materials of the road novel Myka Tucker-Abramson; 16. Lithium in the web of life Kate Montague.
