Capital fictions
Subtitle: the literature of Latin America's export age
By: Ericka Beckman
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Published: 2013
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 254
ISBN-13: 9780816679195; 9780816679201
Subjects: Economics and literature; History and criticism; Latin American fiction
Description: Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. Capital Fictions investigates literature's key role in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America's first major wave of capitalist modernization. Using an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis and drawing from a rich interdisciplinary archive, Ericka Beckman provides the first extended evaluation of Export Age literary production. She traces the emergence of a distinct set of fictions, fantasies, and illusions that accompanied the rise of export-led, dependent capitalism. These "capital fictions" range from promotional pamphlets to Guatemalan coffee and advertisements for French fashions to novels about the stock market collapse in Argentina and rubber extraction in the Amazon. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, Capital Fictions shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period. -- Back cover.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Production: Imagining the export republic; title: Consumption: Modernismo's import catalogues; title: Money I: Financial crisis and the stock market novel; title: Money II: Bankruptcy and decadence; title: Exploitation: A journey to the export real.