This chapter focuses on images and appropriations of computer networks in contemporary literature. Continuing the narrative of earlier chapters on compasses, steam engines, wires, and waves, this chapter explores the manner in which writers used images of networked machines to reimagine community, individuality, and the body. Ciccoricco reads fiction by William Gibson and Porpentine Charity Heartscape as serving to train its readers in the ambivalent business of navigating their own networked realities. “Just as metaphor itself relies on distance between source and target,” Ciccoricco argues, “figurations of networks are vital to the project of maintaining a critical distance from the social and political networks that we propagate and that in turn interpenetrate our experience.”

This chapter looks at the work of the contemporary Noongar writer Kim Scott, focusing both on its portrayal of his family history and the history of Indigenous settler contact in Western Australia. It emphasizes the importance of the university as a context for Scott’s historical fiction, focusing on creative-writing programs and practice-led research. It demonstrates how the rise of “the doctoral novel” plays a vital role in a more plural and more just model of literary engagement.

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.

This introduction offers an extended reading of David Foster Wallace’s 2000 foray into political journalism, “Up, Simba,” which illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn — a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus. To make that case, I trace connections between the communitarian logic of the so-called New Sincerity, the form of post-postmodernism most closely associated with Wallace, and the interventions of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, who rejected key New Deal principles in favor of a "third way" between liberalism and conservativism. This introduction also historicizes "postcritique" and the various "post-ideological" accounts of neoliberal culture, accounts which, in my view, reproduce contemporary liberalism’s ambivalence about the free market and free-market politics, and therefore can be understood as symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret.

This chapter analyzes novels set in gentrifying US neighborhoods to propose that the novel’s complex, dialogic system offers opportunities for exploring the negotiations between structure and individual agency that precipitate processes of gentrification. Adept as the novel is at representing a diverse range of subjectivities and interpersonal relations, stories of gentrification must also show how subjecthood is molded by larger historical, political, and economic forces. The texts are read through close attention to genre, treated neither as a taxonomy of fixed structures nor a concept so anarchic as to be practically non-existent, but as a form of textuality emerging through negotiations between communities comprised of individual genre consumers with specific preferences, and the industries producing texts for consumption. Thus, genre is a useful lens for exploring similar interactions between structure and agency underlying gentrification. There is no single genre of gentrification novel. Rather, the best examples bring genres and modes such as the frontier story and the picturesque into collision or merger in order to show gentrification’s effects on different communities.

Chapter 8, “Procreating on Patmos,” focusing on the tensions and contradictions of the novel today, marks the culmination of this study of the novel’s ambivalence toward procreation. The title comes from Emil Cioran, who warned against having children during end times: “one does not procreate on Patmos.” Our Patmos today is the entire planet menaced by global warming. In contemporary fiction it is the climate emergency that is most likely to induce a hostility toward the prospect of having children. This chapter looks at a wide range of current writers consumed by the moral dilemma of procreation – Zadie Smith, Lydia Davis, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Nell Zink, Ian McEwan – while concentrating on this overriding moral-ecological theme, and its importance in the parallel work of environmental philosophers. The contemporary novel suggests that we might focus less on dystopian imaginings of the future cataclysm, and more on the conditions of present-day life, in which we must reach a decision about the role we should play in the peopling of that future world.

This chapter explores Ian McEwan’s stature as a contemporary British moral novelist by focusing on acute ethical dilemmas in five of his best-known works from the past thirty years: The Child in Time, Black Dogs, Enduring Love, Atonement and Saturday. Beginning with the dramatic episode of a tragic balloon accident in Enduring Love, the chapter analyzes discrete scenes of intense ethical conflict in each text, in which characters are torn between altruism and self-interest. These scenes are interpreted in the context of McEwan’s distinctly self-conscious aesthetic, which makes use of complex and highly ironic relationships between the narrator and the reader. By examining ethical representations in light of McEwan’s sophisticated narrative technique, the chapter argues that McEwan has helped to revive the moral novel for a new generation and has taken his place in the lineage of great moral writers in Britain reaching back to Daniel Defoe.