Real Materialisms: From Marx’s Primitive Accumulation to Trans-corporeality in Smith’s NW, Lanchester’s Capital and Coe’s Number 11
How do three novels from the 2010s perform their complex relationship with 19th-century realism and political economy? Smith’s NW (2012), Lanchester’s Capital (2012) and Coe’s Number 11 (2015) acknowledge their debt to Victorian realism and distance it at the same time: realism exists in ghostly for...
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| Argitaratua izan da: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/ebc, |
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| Egile nagusia: | |
| Formatua: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Hizkuntza: | Anglais |
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Études britanniques contemporaines
2025
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| Sarrera elektronikoa: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Gaia: | How do three novels from the 2010s perform their complex relationship with 19th-century realism and political economy? Smith’s NW (2012), Lanchester’s Capital (2012) and Coe’s Number 11 (2015) acknowledge their debt to Victorian realism and distance it at the same time: realism exists in ghostly form in the guise of palimpsests, metaphors and parodies of the condition of England as they appear in key scenes of Victorian literature. Similarly, Marx and Engels’s concepts of the labouring body, commodity fetichism and primitive accumulation inform these (post)modern narratives. The three novels also showcase more radical forms of ultra contemporary materialism including trans-corporeality and extreme commodification and dispossession. Despite the fracturing and dislocation brought to bear on the ‘bourgeois epic’ (Lukács) and the main tenets of political economy, the three novelists offer us a renewed realism that plays with what David Harvey has called a geography of hope. |
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