After Marx: Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century

Description

After Marx:Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.

Colleen Lye is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley. She is the author of America's Asia (Princeton UP, 2005) and the co-editor of several special journal issues on the topics of realism, financialization, and the struggle for public higher education. Currently she is at work on a book on the Asian American sixties. Christopher Nealon teaches English at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Foundlings: Lesbian and Gay Historical Emotion before Stonewall (2001) and The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century (2011), and four books of poetry, most recently Heteronomy (2014), and The Shore (2020).