"What might the field look like if it were to topple, or at least more thoroughly scrutinize, the
reception of the realist novel as the primary literary form where social knowledge is produced and disseminated?
In this excellent essay in the Minnesota Review by Patrick Fessenbecker and Bryan Yazell, the authors bring Sarah Comyn's Political Economy and The Novel: A Literary history of 'Homo Economicus' and Nancy Henry's (2016) Women, Literature, and Finance in Victorian and other work into productive conversation with The Routledge Companion to Literature and Economics that Matt Seybold and I edited.
I've been thinking about it a lot, recently, in part because I read so few realist novels, these days. I consume popular culture, I read a lot of essays, and I read political economy.
But this is the kind of dialogue Matt and I were hoping to spark when we wrote the introduction, and I'm hoping to have something more substantial to contribute to these ongoing conversations about how literature and economics might relate, at my section at The Los Angeles Review of Books, eventually. I had something planned last year, but pandemic.
For now Lee Konstantinou and Dan Sinykin have just edited a special issue of American Literary History about literature and the economics of publishing, and I'm also excited to read Richard Jean So's book about Redlining Culture.