This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.

This chapter is unusually long and might be best thought of as being made of three subchapters, all of which help explain the ideas that animate this book. In considering how you might use this chapter, it might be worth thinking about how the sections of this chapter answer different sorts of questions, and they may be of greater or lesser use depending on what you’re hoping to get out of the cases. The first section of this chapter (“What Is Neoliberalism”) explains what the authors and editors mean by “neoliberalism” and develops the specific idea of “market imperialism” to explain what exasperates the authors and editors. The second section (“The Problematic Theoretical Underpinning of Market Imperialism”) presents and critiques the arguments that undergird advocates of market imperialism. The final section (“Conclusion: Network of Thinkers and Art of Government”) explains how neoliberalism and market imperialism can operate even though individual people may not explicitly see themselves as advocates of neoliberalism and market imperialism. This last section also summarizes some common attributes of market imperialism and neoliberal thinking.