This book is a transnational study of how contemporary fiction writers from the United States and Canada to Nigeria to India to Dubai have conceptualized the emergent social spaces of the diverse corners of the neoliberal world system. Over the span of the past three to four decades, free market economic policies have been sold to or pushed upon every society on the globe in some way, shape, or form. The upshot of this has been a world system structured in terms of a vast shift of power and resources from government to private enterprise, dwindling civic life replaced by rising consumerism, an emerging oligarchic rentier class, large segments of population faced with meager material conditions of existence and few prospects of socio-economic mobility, and a looming sense of a near future dominated by further economic collapses and mounting social strife. This book analyses a wide cultural array of some of the most poignant narrative engagements with neoliberalism in its various localized manifestations throughout the world.

The first book-length study of the literature of growing wealth polarizations of neoliberal society

Acknowledgments.- 1. Introduction.- PART I: BROAD TRENDS.- 2. Contemporary North American Narrative Fiction and the Landscapes of Neoliberalism: The Explosion of Corporate Capitalism and the Spaces of the Fallen American Middle Class.- 3. Speculation, Social Conflict, and the Ethics of Untrammeled Accumulation in the American Neoliberal Financier Novel.- 4. Spatial Division, Bricolage Settlement, and Informal Economies in the Developing World Slum Novel.- PART II: CASES IN POINT.- 5. Psycho-Geographic Orientation in the Neoliberal City: Establishing and Contesting Place Identity in the Nascent Literature of Dubai.- 6. Sense of Place, Consumer Capitalism, and the Sexual Politics of Global Nomadism in the Popular Fiction of Dubai.- 7. The Spatial/Political-Economic Dynamics of the Theme Park in Contemporary Transatlantic Fiction.- 8. Conclusion: Humanistic Study in a Time of Nightmare Economics.- Notes.- Bibliography.- Index.