Literature and Capital

What is the value of literature?

In this important new work, Thomas Docherty charts a new economic history of literary culture and its institutions in the modern age. From the literary patronage of the early modern period, through the colonial exploitation of the 18th and 19th centuries to the institutionalisation of "literature" in the neoliberal university of the 21st century, Literature and Capital explores the changing ways in which literary culture has both resisted and become complicit with exploitative economic notions of value.

Drawing on the work of economic and political thinkers such as Thomas Piketty, Naomi Klein, Edward Said and Raymond Williams, the book includes readings of work by a wide range of canonical authors from Shakespeare, Donne and Swift to Tolstoy, Woolf and Ishiguro.

Autorentext

Thomas Docherty is Professor of English at Warwick University. He has published on most areas of English and comparative literature from the Renaissance to the present day. He specializes in the philosophy of literary criticism, in critical theory, and in cultural history in relation primarily to European philosophy and literatures. Some of his previous publications include John Donne Undone (Methuen/Routledge, 1986), Postmodernism (Harvester/Columbia UP, 1993), Aesthetic Democracy (Stanford UP, 2006) and The English Question (Sussex Academic, 2008).

Inhalt

Preface
Part 1: Land and Letters

1. Capital and the Embrace of Letters
2. On the Credibility of Writing: Material Promise
3. The Career of English
   Part 2: Culture and Capital
4. Governing the Tongue
5. Inequality, Management and the Hatred of Literature
6. Cultural Capital and the Shameful University
   Part 3: Institutional and Human Capital
7. The Privatization of All Interests
8. Radical Geography
   Index