Commodities and literature / edited by Sudesh Mishra, Caitlin Vandertop.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Mishra, Sudesh, editor.

Vandertop, Caitlin, editor.

Series:

Cambridge critical concepts.

Cambridge critical concepts

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Commercial products in literature.

Material culture in literature.

Commerce in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiii, 356 pages).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

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?

Contents:

Tea and the silk roads of world literature / Wen-chin Ouyang

The travels of texts and coffee in early modern culture / Natalya Din-Kariuki

Fossil fuels and the fiction of extraction / Elizabeth Carolyn Miller

(Post)colonial books as commodity and anti-commodity / Russell West-Pavlov

The commodity frontiers of world-literature : coal and soy / Michael Niblett

The devil's metal : tin and the ecologies of commodity criticism / Chris Campbell

Commodifying care : migrant literature and materialist feminism / Kate Houlden

Kinship and indigenous anti-commodities / Artemis Caine and Megan Kuster

Sugar : literature's bitter, bitter commodity / Sudesh Mishra

The (in)significance of rum / Jennifer P. Nesbitt

Opium's imperial intimacies / Julia Kuehn

Guano and the fictions of fertile islands / Caitlin Vandertop

Water in world literature / Bonnie Etherington

From Napoleon to MacArthur : the story of SPAM / Anurag Subramani

Oil, commodity frontiers and the materials of the road novel / Myka Tucker-Abramson

Lithium in the web of life / Kate Montague.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 17 Oct 2025).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-009-43229-X

1-009-43233-8

1-009-43234-6

OCLC:

1510683225