Overview

Winner of the 2012 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Monsters of the Market investigates the rise of capitalism through the prism of the body-panics it arouses. Drawing on folklore, literature and popular culture, the book links tales of monstrosity from early-modern England, including Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, to a spate of recent vampire- and zombie-fables from sub-Saharan Africa, and it connects these to Marx’s persistent use of monster-metaphors in his descriptions of capitalism. Reading across these tales of the grotesque, Monsters of the Market offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of a global market-system. The book thus makes original contributions to political economy, cultural theory, commodification-studies and ‘body-theory’.

Full Product Details

Author:   David McNally
Publisher:   Brill
Imprint:   Brill
Volume:   30
Dimensions:   Width: 16.00cm , Height: 2.30cm , Length: 24.00cm
Weight:   0.674kg
ISBN:  

9789004201576

ISBN 10:   9004201572
Pages:   296
Publication Date:   12 July 2011
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Introduction 1. Dissecting the Labouring Body: Frankenstein, Political Anatomy and the Rise of Capitalism ‘Save my body from the surgeons’ The culture of dissection: anatomy, colonisation and social order Political anatomy, wage-labour and destruction of the English commons Anatomy and the corpse-economy Monsters of rebellion Jacobins, Irishmen and Luddites: rebel-monsters in the age of Frankenstein The rights of monsters: horror and the split society 2. Marx’s Monsters: Vampire-Capital and the Nightmare-World of Late Capitalism Dialectics and the doubled life of the commodity The spectre of value and the fetishism of commodities ‘As if by love possessed’: vampire capital and the labouring body Zombie-labour and the ‘monstrous outrages’ of capital Money: capitalism’s second nature ‘Self-birthing’ capital and the alchemy of money Wild money: the occult economies of late-capitalist globalisation Enron: case-study in the occult economy of late capitalism ‘Capital comes into the world dripping in blood from every pore’ 3. African Vampires in the Age of Globalisation Kinship and accumulation: from the old witchcraft to the new Zombies, vampires, and spectres of capital: the new occult economies of globalising capitalism African fetishes and the fetishism of commodities The living dead: zombie-labourers in the age of globalisation Vampire-capitalism in Sub-Saharan Africa Bewitched accumulation, famished roads, and the endless toilers of the Earth Conclusion: Ugly Beauty: Monstrous Dreams of Utopia References Index

Reviews

Monsters of the Market is essential reading for anybody working in the field of critical social theory, critical sociology, political economy, etc., and suitable for a wide range of theory and culture courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Mark Worrell, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, 29 February 2012

Monsters of the Market is essential reading for anybody working in the field of critical social theory, critical sociology, political economy, etc., and suitable for a wide range of theory and culture courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels. Mark Worrell, Marx and Philosophy Review of Books, 29 February 2012

Author Information

David McNally, Ph.D (1983) is Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He is the author of five previous books and has published widely on political economy, Marxism, and contemporary social justice movements.

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