The Crisis of Capitalism in the Contemporary Novel

This book explores the role of radical ideas in contemporary fiction by nine critically acclaimed authors—Jonathan Lethem, Dana Spiotta, China Miéville, Thomas Pynchon, Rachel Kushner, Teddy Wayne, Colson Whitehead, Jacqueline Woodson, and Kim Stanley Robinson.
All of them share interests in the politics of the left, the problems of protracted economic crisis, and the potentiality of post-capitalist ideas.
Novels by these authors, this book argues, are defined by an imperative to confront current anxieties in left-thought, while, at the same time, evincing a nuanced degree of self-consciousness about the legacy of political radicalisms, the costs they accrue, and where they have led.

Andrew Rowcroft is an associate lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln in England.

Andrew Rowcroft
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 205
Bibliographic Info:appendix, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2024
pISBN: 978-1-4766-9226-5
eISBN: 978-1-4766-5217-7
Imprint: McFarland

Abstract v
Acknowledgments vi
Preface 1
Introduction 3
1. A Search for Method 23
2. Reading the New Ruins: Mourning, Melancholy, and Loss in Dissident Gardens and Eat the Document 34
3. The Return of the Spectre: Gothic Marxism in The City & The City 59
4. From Reel to Real: Forming Radicalism in The Flamethrowers 74
5. Dying to Buy: Evicted, Apartment, and Generation Rent 84
6. Fictions of Financial Crisis: Pynchon, Marx, Neoliberalism 98
7. Growing Up, Growing Old, in Red at the Bone and Another Brooklyn 123
8. Capital, Liquidity, and Revolution in New York: 2140 134
Epilogue 144
Appendix 147
Chapter Notes 153
Bibliography 181
Index 195

• “Drawing on and extending Jameson’s critical practice, the author pays careful attention to the ways that contemporary writers formally register the crises and promises of left-wing politics”—Stephen Schryer, author of Maximum Feasible Participation: American Literature and the War on Poverty

• “Rowcroft’s persuasive and clear-sighted book represents and important intervention in the study of contemporary fiction and left politics”—Arin Keeble, author of Twenty-First Century Fictions of Terrorism