Economic Criticism

This year’s review of work in economic criticism focuses on three points of interest that reflect the year’s work in economic theory, providing an overview of some of the broader critical enquiries preoccupying the field of economic writing in 2023 and early 2024. The first is the intersection of animal studies and Marxism, exemplified by Leigh Claire La Berge’s Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. The second key aspect of economic writing this year is the overlapping concerns of women, money, and property, represented here in Lana L. Dalley’s edited collection, Women’s Economic Writing in the Nineteenth Century and Jill Rappoport’s Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction. The third focus lands on speculative time and futurity within the domain of American literature, capitalism, and finance, as Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis astutely captures.