Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature

by Liam Kennedy (Editor), Stephen Shapiro (Editor)

Neoliberalism is the rare buzzword that has fully crossed over from academic theorizing into mainstream discussion. Neoliberalism and Contemporary American Literature is the first book to examine the ways that US literature has responded to the dominance of our neoliberal regime. The essays collected here reveal how contemporary American writers have both propped up and interrogated the foundations of neoliberalism. The contributors look at a host of literary genres and styles, from the utopian sci-fi of Kim Stanley Robinson and the dark fantasy of Karen Russell to the poetic memoir-fiction hybrids of Ben Lerner, exploring how the relationships between politics, economics, and literary form have become both distorted and revitalized in the age of neoliberalism. Most pressingly, they ask if contemporary literature can still imagine either the end of capitalism or any realistic alternative to it.
 

252 pages, Hardcover

Published October 15, 2019

About the author

Professor Liam Kennedy is Director of the Clinton Institute for American Studies at University College Dublin. He has diverse research interests and teaching experiences, spanning the fields of American urban studies, visual culture, globalisation and transatlantic relations.

He is the author of Susan Sontag: Mind as Passion (1995) and Race and Urban Space in American Culture (2000). He is co-editor of Urban Space and Representation (1999) and City Sites: An Electronic Book (2000), and editor of Remaking Birmingham: The Visual Culture of Urban Regeneration (2004).

Professor Kennedy's work is interdisciplinary, blending cultural and political modes of scholarly analysis, and represents American Studies as a valuable framework to study both American domestic and international affairs.

He is currently researching a monograph on photography and international conflict, and preparing two edited books - on urban photography and on cultural diplomacy and US foreign policy.