Overview

Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opium, guano, oil and lithium, as they appear across a range of texts, periods, areas, and genres, the chapters bring together existing scholarship on literature and commodity culture with new perspectives from world-literary, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, the environmental and energy humanities, and book history. How, this volume asks, have commodities shaped literary forms and modes of reading? And how has literature engaged with the world-making trajectories and transformations of commodities?

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9781009432320

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Sudesh Mishra has received an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry, an Asialink Residency in India, the Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara Fellowship (Otago University) and an Erskine Canterbury Fellowship (Canterbury University). He was awarded a New Horizons Fellowship (Tubingen University) for 2024-2025. Caitlin Vandertop is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She was previously based at the University of the South Pacific and the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth Century Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

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