Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Histories and Critical Traditions
- Part II Contemporary Critical Perspectives
- Chapter 8 The Economy of Race
- Chapter 9 American Literature and the Fiction of Corporate Personhood
- Chapter 10 Political Economy, the Family, and Sexuality
- Chapter 11 The Literary Marketplace and the Rise of Neoliberalism
- Chapter 12 World-Systems and Literary Studies
- Chapter 13 Crisis, Labor, and the Contemporary
- Chapter 14 Speculative Fiction and Post-Capitalist Speculative Economies: Blueprints and Critiques
- Part III Interdisciplinary Exchanges
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Chapter 9 - American Literature and the Fiction of Corporate Personhood
from Part II - Contemporary Critical Perspectives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2022
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I Histories and Critical Traditions
- Part II Contemporary Critical Perspectives
- Chapter 8 The Economy of Race
- Chapter 9 American Literature and the Fiction of Corporate Personhood
- Chapter 10 Political Economy, the Family, and Sexuality
- Chapter 11 The Literary Marketplace and the Rise of Neoliberalism
- Chapter 12 World-Systems and Literary Studies
- Chapter 13 Crisis, Labor, and the Contemporary
- Chapter 14 Speculative Fiction and Post-Capitalist Speculative Economies: Blueprints and Critiques
- Part III Interdisciplinary Exchanges
- Further Reading
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).
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- The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics , pp. 148 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2022