Modernism and Market Fantasy : British Fictions of Capital, 1910-1939

In "Modernism and Market Fantasy", Carey Mickalites explores British modernist fiction's critical designs on the changing economic culture in which it took shape. Examining work that ranges from pre-war impressionism through the late modernism of the 1930s, he shows how modernist innovation engages directly with the transitions that mark early twentieth-century capitalism. Mickalites places modernist texts in relationship to particular economic structures: an investment and finance economy that imagines endlessly inflated returns through speculative trading; the anxieties of selfhood produced by capitalist exchange and private property; advertising and fashion culture's dream worlds of perpetual self-renewal; and commercial spectacle's capacity to generate new public affects. Demonstrating that prominent modernists viewed the market as an abstract space organized around irrational fantasies and anxieties, Mickalites argues that modernism reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions in an effort to blast an increasingly reified economic culture into a new historical consciousness of itself Cover......Page 1 Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 7 Introduction......Page 8 Part I: Investment, Circulation, and Loss......Page 32 1 Impressions of the Market: Ford, Conrad, and Modernist Investment Fantasy......Page 34 2 Dubliners’ IOU: Joyce’s Aesthetics of Exchange......Page 68 Part II: Spectacle and Affect......Page 94 3 The Instant and the Outmoded: Wyndham Lewis, Ulysses, and the Spectacle of Time......Page 96 4 Alienated Vision and the Will to Intimacy, or Virginia Woolf and “the Human Spectacle”......Page 140 5 Good Morning, Midnight: Jean Rhys’s Melancholic Late Modernism......Page 177 Conclusion......Page 203 Notes......Page 205 Bibliography......Page 234 Index......Page 243 Examining work from Ford and Conrad's pre-war impressionism through Rhys's fiction of the late 1930s, this text shows how modernist innovation engages with transformations in early 20th century capitalism and how modernist fiction reconfigured capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions. - Povzetek iz besedila na hrbtu knj Examining work from Ford and Conrad's pre-war impressionism through Rhys's fiction of the late 1930s, the author shows how modernist innovation engages with transformations in early twentieth-century capitalism and tracks the ways in which modernist fiction reconfigures capitalist mythologies along the fault lines of their internal contradictions.