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In this highly original reexamination of North American poetry in English from Ezra Pound to the present day, Christopher Nealon demonstrates that the most vital writing of the period is deeply concerned with capitalism. This focus is not exclusive to the work of left-wing poets: the problem of capitalism's effect on individuals, communities, and cultures is central to a wide variety of poetry, across a range of political and aesthetic orientations. Indeed, Nealon asserts, capitalism is the material out of which poetry in English has been created over the last century. Much as poets of previous ages continually examined topics such as the deeds of King Arthur or the history of Troy, poets as diverse as Jack Spicer, John Ashbery, and Claudia Rankine have taken as their "matter" the dynamics and impact of capitalism-not least its tendency to generate economic and political turmoil. Nealon argues persuasively that poets' attention to the matter of capital has created a corresponding notion of poetry as a kind of textual matter, capable of dispersal, retrieval, and disguise in times of crisis. Offering fresh readings of canonical poets from W. H. Auden to Adrienne Rich, as well as interpretations of younger writers like Kevin Davies, The Matter of Capital reorients our understanding of the central poetic project of the last century.

American poetry --- Capitalism and literature --- American literature --- Literature and capitalism --- Literature --- History and criticism --- E-books --- Capitalism and literature. --- History and criticism.

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After Marx:Literature, Theory and Value demonstrates the importance of Marxist literary and cultural criticism for an era of intersectional politics and economic decline. The volume includes fresh approaches to reading poetry, fiction, film and drama, from Shakespeare to contemporary literature, and shows how Marxist literary criticism improves our understanding of racial capitalism, feminist politics, colonialism, deindustrialization, high-tech labor, ecological crisis, and other issues. A key innovation of the volume's essays is how they attend to Marx's theory of value. For Marx, capitalist value demands a range of different kinds of labor as well as unemployment. This book shows the importance of Marxist approaches to literature that reach beyond simply demonstrating the revolutionary potential or the political consciousness of a 19th-century-style industrial working class. After Marx makes an argument for the twenty-first century interconnectedness of widely different literary genres, and far-flung political struggles.

Marxist criticism. --- Communism and literature. --- Literature --- Literature and communism --- Communism and literature --- Communist aesthetics --- Criticism --- Criticism, Marxist --- Marxian criticism --- Marxist literary criticism

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Politics --- Literature --- Marx, Karl

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"Christopher Chitty was a graduate student and activist at UC-Santa Cruz who committed suicide in 2015. The project that Chitty left behind, entitled SEXUAL HEGEMONY, reveals how the policing of male homosexuality happened in conjunction with the establishment of capitalist economies across Europe and the U.S. Writing against a thesis of modernization in which sexual freedom advances alongside the development of commodity production and state formation, Chitty instead shows how the rise of capitalism has embedded a bourgeois sexual hegemony into property relations, economic crises, and political institutions. Drawing on queer theory, Marxism, Foucault, Gramsci, and world-systems-analysis, Chitty demonstrates that male same-sex intimacy and sex have systematically been constructed as problematic for bourgeois polities. The book begins with an introduction by Christopher Nealon that situates Chitty's work among new scholarship bringing Marxism into conversation with queer theory, and that speculates on some of the Marxist feminist texts that might have helped extend Chitty's limited analysis of lesbian and other non-male queer sexualities. Chitty's own work begins by considering Michel Foucault's idea that sexuality arises from the discourse of sexual science. Instead, Chitty argues that sexuality came into being as a result of the contradiction between the forces and relations of production inherent in the development of capitalism. The book's chapters proceed in chronological order, tracking the politicization of male homosexuality in Florence, Amsterdam, London, Paris, and New York. Chitty considers the secular offices of the late medieval and early modern Mediterranean world, which employed a sliding scale of penalties to regulate a flourishing culture of sodomy in Florence. Then he considers Atlantic seafaring culture of London and Amsterdam of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and public urinal design in Paris of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although unfinished, SEXUAL HEGEMONY is theoretically bold. It will make an important contribution to Marxist queer theory, early modern studies, and studies of sexuality"-- Provided by publisher.

Queer theory --- Homosexuality --- Capitalism --- Philosophy, Marxist --- Marxian economics --- Socialist feminism --- Political aspects --- Social aspects