Western thinking about original sin gets its gravity from Augustine. Some orbit him. Others blast against him till they achieve escape velocity. Aquinas was in orbit, but in a distinctive path. I now explore Aquinas’s views. Aquinas believed in a historical Adam and Eve, and treated the Genesis account of the fall as literal, fly-on-the-wall, accurate history. To ease exposition, I speak within these assumptions.

This chapter examines literary representations and critiques of postcolonial capitalism, a form of capitalism that is practiced, rationalized, and imagined with respect to a historical and geopolitical consciousness of colonial subordination. Recognizing the significance of postcolonial capitalism as its own distinct formation, the essay argues, is important for rethinking dominant approaches to critical studies of capitalism. The essay examines how literary texts take up themes of postcolonial capitalism such as racial and historical difference as a form of cultural and social capital, subaltern capitalism, capitalism as redress for historical injustice, expressions of economic solidarity, and new configurations of power. Authors under discussion include Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Aravind Adiga, Amitav Ghosh, and Derek Walcott.

The development of a scientific economic discourse and the expansion of the financial system and markets across the nineteenth century and through the British Empire proved to be rich sources of inspiration to novelists and poets. Fictional writers not only explored the themes of stock market crashes, imperial investments, industrial expansion, gambling and risk taking, fraudulent currencies, and bank failures, but also the failure of political economy to account properly for the inadequacies of the economic system and the people who fell victim to those failures. Examining the interplay, interaction, and coconstitution of literary and economic discourses in the nineteenth century, this chapter demonstrates the celebratory and critical ways economic writers, essayists, novelists, and poets represented and responded to political economy’s evolution. Reading the history of economic thought alongside the literary texts of the nineteenth century – this chapter argues – reveals their shared investments in value, representation, and human desires.

Aquinas’s writings on normative ethics are vast, with 1,004 articles on virtue ethics and related matters in the Summa theologiae (ST) alone. These writings constitute an extraordinarily intricate picture of the kind of human life that Aquinas considers normative, but they also contain plenty of surprises, especially for those who assume that Aquinas is guided principally by the virtue ethics of Aristotle. Arguably the greatest of these surprises is that Aquinas’s writings on virtue ethics are not, in fact, simply about virtues. Instead, Aquinas’s virtues in the ST are integrated into a fourfold system of perfective attributes, namely virtues, gifts, beatitudes, and fruits (VGBF). In this chapter, I present a brief summary of this system and my interpretation of its meaning in the light of recent research.

Britain in the “long eighteenth century” was the stage for some of the most momentous phases in the emergence of modern capitalism, from the founding of key financial institutions to stock market crashes, rapid urbanization, the beginnings of industrialization, and the expansion of empire. This chapter traces the often-formative role of imaginative writing in conceptualizing monetary and socioeconomic transformation. Prior to the division of disciplines, figures such as Daniel Defoe and Bernard Mandeville moved between modes now differentiated as “literary” and “economic” while, at the end of the period, even exponents of emergent political economy such as Thomas Malthus and Jane Marcet felt called to answer the representations of a poet, and a verse satire helped to shift government economic policy. The chapter examines by turn the place of literature in framing and contesting the new centrality of credit, the defining metaphors that marked the route to a “de-moralized” economic science, and how the focus on landed property and wealth inequality in the work of realist and Gothic novelists relates to heterodox traditions, outside neoclassical economics.

Since the 1960s, structural shifts in the publishing industry and the wider economy – commonly denoted by the term “neoliberal” – have expanded and intensified the commercial pressures on the literary field. This chapter’s first section identifies the specific forms that neoliberalism has taken in the world of publishing and bookselling. The second section examines how recent novels by Kate Zambreno, Eugene Lim, and Jordy Rosenberg self-consciously negotiate the publishing industry’s simultaneous yet conflicting demands for novelty and familiarity, especially as they relate to expectations surrounding representations of femininity, race, ethnicity, and trans identity. The concluding section reads recent fiction by Helen DeWitt and Rachel Cusk as meditations on how, rather than simply decrying, or capitulating to, the growing power of literary marketing and promotion, the “serious” contemporary writer might – at least in principle – utilize that power precisely in order to stimulate consumer appetite for seriousness as a desirable literary quality.

Grace is a gratuitous divine gift that exceeds our human nature and allows us to obtain a supernatural, eternal good. Thomas Aquinas, who attempts to formulate the orthodox Christian teaching on grace, understands by it in one sense a stable disposition (habitus) infused by God into the soul that lifts human nature so as to partake in the divine nature. It is thus a created reality, not simply the fact of enjoying God’s favor. In a second sense, he understands by grace an aid (auxilium) of God moving us to know, will, or do something. While Aquinas’s terminology varies, scholars call the first kind ‘habitual grace’ and the second ‘actual grace.’1

The aim of this chapter is to introduce Aquinas’s account of ultimate explanations in metaphysics. What are the constituent principles of created reality? What do they indicate about God in his unique existence, nature, and divine simplicity? How may one reasonably understand the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in light of the affirmation of divine simplicity? To consider these questions I will proceed in three stages, examining first Aquinas’s distinctive claims regarding the distinction of essence and existence in creatures; second his interpretation of the traditional Christian affirmation that the divine nature is simple; and third his concept of Trinitarian persons as subsistent relations, a teaching that helps illustrate the logical compatibility of Aquinas’s Trinitarian theology, his doctrine of God, and his metaphysics of creaturely composition.

This chapter considers the difficulty that economics has found in defining labor as a practice separate from its product. Looking first at classical and Marxist economics, it uses feminist economics to highlight the omissions that conventional definitions of labor contain, especially concerning the work of women. By comparing feminist economics with recent novels by women, including Halle Butler’s The New Me (2019), Alice Furse’s Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere (2014), Heike Geissler’s Seasonal Associate (2014), Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020), and Ling Ma’s Severance (2018), it argues that contemporary fiction has been attentive to the same omissions. Through a reading of the techniques of literary fiction, including realism and a range of experimental narrative devices, the chapter proposes that the contemporary novel offers kinds of writing that expand our conception of labor. Contemporary fiction contains narratives that highlight the work of social reproduction as a central component of the economies of labor and offer a wider critique of economic categories of value.

Wherever Aquinas discusses mental life – cognition, perception, thought, knowledge, reasoning – his writing can seem like a trackless wilderness to the uninitiated. The texts overflow with technical Latin terms that come into English as impenetrable jargon: ‘intellect in actuality,’ ‘habit of science,’ ‘sensible species,’ ‘intelligible being,’ ‘intellected intention,’ ‘estimative power,’ ‘word of the heart.’ Even terms corresponding to familiar English terms, such as ‘belief,’ ‘judgment,’ ‘experience,’ ‘passion,’ ‘intention,’ or ‘perception,’ are used in confusing and unexpected ways.

The doctrine of the Incarnation is the Christian teaching that Jesus Christ, the man who was born of Mary and crucified under Pontius Pilate, was not merely a human, but was God incarnate – one person of the Holy Trinity. Retaining his divine nature, the Son of God took on, or assumed, in the technical language, a human nature, and thus became a real human, no less a human than you or I. Jesus Christ, then, on the traditional view that Aquinas inherited and defended, is one divine person with two complete natures. This chapter will focus on Aquinas’s metaphysical understanding of the Incarnation. For a discussion of the goal of the Incarnation – the regeneration of humans to right relationship with God – seein this volume, by Thomas Williams.1

The nature of Aquinas’s ethical theory has often been the subject of debate among scholars. During much of the twentieth century, he was regarded as holding a natural law theory. In more recent years, recognition of his extensive discussion on virtue has led scholars to argue for a virtue-based account. Currently, an important debate centers on what counts as genuine virtues for Aquinas.