Paul Crosthwaite

The etymological affinity between ‘criticism’ and ‘crisis’ has never been more resonant than it is today, when social life is increasingly understood as defined by a succession of overlapping global crises: financial and economic crises; environmental crises; geopolitical crises; terrorist crises; public health crises. But what is the role of literary and cultural criticism in conceptualizing this atmosphere of perpetual crisis? If, as Paul de Man maintained, criticism necessarily exists in a state of crisis, in what ways is this condition intensified at a time when the social formations within which criticism operates and the cultural artefacts that it takes as its objects are themselves pervaded by actual and imagined states of emergency? This book, the first sustained response to these questions, demonstrates the capacity of critical thought, working in dialogue with key narrative texts, to provide penetrating insights into a contemporary landscape of global, manufactured risk. Written by an international team of specialist scholars, the essays in the collection draw on a wide variety of contemporary theoretical, fictional, and cinematic sources, ranging from Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, and Fredric Jameson to Cormac McCarthy, Ian McEwan, and Lauren Beukes to Ghost and the James Bond and National Treasure series. Appearing in the midst of a phase of extraordinary turbulence in the fabric of our interconnected and interdependent world, the book makes a landmark intervention in debates concerning the cultural ramifications of globalization.

Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk

Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative

Contemporary British and American fiction is defined by financial markets' power over the global publishing industry and the global economy.

The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction

Peter Knight

Nicky Marsh

What does 'the market' look like? What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present documents how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. Richly illustrated, it tells the story of how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible and self-referential nature of money and finance, from the South Sea Bubble of the eighteenth century to the global financial crisis of 2008. Show Me the Money sets out the history and politics of representations of finance through five essays by academic experts and curators, and is interspersed with provocative think pieces by notable public commentators on finance and art. The book, and the exhibition on which it is based, explore a wide range of images, from satirical eighteenth-century prints by William Hogarth and James Gillray to works by celebrated contemporary artists such as Andreas Gursky and Molly Crabapple. It also charts the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts, and electronic trading systems. Show Me the Money demonstrates that the visual culture of finance has not merely reflected prevailing attitudes to money and banking, but has been crucial in forging – and at times critiquing – the very idea of 'the market'.

Paul Crosthwaite

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