Neoliberalism and the Novel

Neoliberalism and the Novel considers how developments in the form and reception of the novel have been influenced by changes in the arrangements of capital in the last forty years. It considers the way in which the neoliberal novel deploys familiar generic patterns as a site from which to offer critique; examines the changing operation of labour and time under neoliberalism and its effect on novel form; and offers a broader call for new reading and interpretative practices to respond to changing socio-economic realities. This book was originally published as a special issue of Textual Practice.

The novel form has long been connected to modern capitalism and is, arguably, the literary genre most prominently enmeshed in contemporary global markets. Yet, as many critics have suggested about capital, something has changed in the last forty years. With the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant global economic rationality and mode of governance, the experience of capital has produced new ways of seeing and relating to the world, leading, as David Harvey observes, to "the financialization of everything". The novel, indexed to capital in myriad ways, then, must similarly have been transformed.