Neoliberalism and the Novel

Emily Johansen is Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA. Her book, Cosmopolitanism and Place: Spatial Forms in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, was released in 2014. She has written recent articles for Critique, Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, and Textual Practice. Alissa G. Karl is Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York, Brockport, NY, USA. Her research investigates the economic histories and imaginaries that impact the production and form of modern and contemporary literature and culture, and has appeared in such venues as American Literature, Novel, Modern Fiction Studies, and Textual Practice.

Introduction: reading and writing the economic present 1. The betrayals of neoliberalism in Shyam Selvadurai’s Funny Boy 2. Margaret Atwood’s dystopic fiction and the contradictions of neoliberal freedom 3. Neoliberalism and the limits of the human: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach 4. Reading alongside the market: affect and mobility in contemporary American migrant fiction 5. The banal conviviality of neoliberal cosmopolitanism 6. Managed risk and the lure of transparency in Anglophone African detective noir 7. The zero hour of the neoliberal novel 8. Neoliberalism and the time of the novel