Commodities and Literature (Cambridge Critical Concepts)

By: Caitlin Vandertop and Sudesh Mishra

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Synopsis: Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opium, guano, oil and lithium, as they appear across a range of texts, periods, areas, and genres, the chapters bring together existing scholarship on literature and commodity culture with new perspectives from world-literary, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, the environmental and energy humanities, and book history. How, this volume asks, have commodities shaped literary forms and modes of reading? And how has literature engaged with the world-making trajectories and transformations of commodities?