Rethinking Fiction after the 2007/8 Financial Crisis

Book excerpt: This book provides insight into the impact the 2007/8 financial crisis and subsequent Great Recession had on American fiction. Employing an interdisciplinary approach which combines literary studies with anthropology, economics, sociology, and psychology, the author attempts to gauge the changes that the crisis facilitated in the American novel. Focusing on four books, Elizabeth Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, Philipp Meyer’s American Rust, Sophie McManus’s The Unfortunates, and William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the study traces how they present such issues as poverty, wealth, equality, distinction, opportunity, and how they relate both to traditional criticisms of consumer culture and the US economy, particularly those issues that have received more attention as a result of the crisis. It also tackles the issue of genre and interpretation in this period, as well as what methods the analyzed novels employ in order to highlight the decreasing social mobility of Americans.