Author Description

"Fictions of Commodity Culture is a wide-ranging study of consumerism and its literary representation from the Victorian period through to the postmodern era. Cutting across period boundaries, this book draws on recent thinking in critical and cultural theory to offer analysis of works by writers as diverse as Elizabeth Gaskell, William Thackeray, Anthony Trollope, Joseph Conrad, and Don DeLillo. From Gaskell's prefiguring of Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting to Conrad's foreshadowing of the Sex Pistols story, Fictions of Commodity Culture shows the ways in which cultural production in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries often anticipated the crazy and disorienting consumer world of late capitalism."--Jacket.