We live in an era of economic fabling where often fantastic representations of economic life in popular culture sit uncomfortably alongside a neoliberal capitalist fairy tale that the Earth's resources can continue to be exploited into an indefinite future. This book examines a variety of animated movies, TV shows, written fictions, adventure travelogues, Paleo archeologies (and diets) to suggest that popular culture poses a multiform challenge to the failing theories and practices of neoclassical economics. Popular Culture and Political Economic Thought: Fables of Commonwealth contends that it does so most successfully by implementing older formations of political economic thought: stages theory, bioeconomics, and a robust discourse on commonwealth. An era of eco-crisis demands a new economics. It therefore also requires a new appraisal of the popular imaginary and its potential for leveraging alternative conceptions of economic and political relations. This book begins that conversation.

An analysis of how nineteenth-century women regional writers represent political economic thought. Readers of late nineteenth-century female American authors are familiar with plots, characters, and households that make a virtue of economizing. Scholars often interpret these scenarios in terms of a mythos of parsimony, frequently accompanied by a sort of elegiac republicanism whereby self-sufficiency and autonomy are put to the service of the greater good - a counterworld to the actual economic conditions of the period. In Kitchen Economics: Women's Regionalist Fiction and Political Economy, Thomas Strychacz takes a new approach to the question of how female regionalist fictions represent "the economic" by situating them within traditions of classical political economic thought. Offering case studies of key works by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Rose Terry Cooke, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson, this study focuses on three complex cultural fables - the island commonwealth, stadialism (or stage theory), and feeding the body politic - which found formal expression in political economic thought, made their way into endless public debates about the economic turmoil of the late nineteenth century, and informed female authors. These works represent counterparts, not counterworlds, to modernity; and their characteristic stance is captured in the complex trope of feminaeconomica. This approach ultimately leads us to reconsider what we mean by the term "economic," for the emphasis of contemporary neoclassical economics on economic agents given over to infinite wants and complete self-interest has caused the "sufficiency" and "common good" models of female regionalist authors to be misinterpreted and misvalued. These fictions are nowhere more pertinent to modernity than in their alliance with today's important alternative economic discourses.

In Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism Thomas Strychacz argues that modernist writers need to be understood both in their relationship to professional critics and in their relationship to an era and ethos of professionalism. In studying four modernist writers--Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Nathanael West--Strychacz finds that contrary to what most studies suggest, modernist writers (in the period of 1880-1940) are thoroughly caught up in the ideas and expressive forms of mass culture rather than opposed to them. Despite this, modernist writers seek to distinguish their ideas and styles from mass culture, particularly by making their works esoteric. In doing so, modernist writers are reproducing one of the main tenets of all professional groups, which is to gain social authority by forming a community around a difficult language inaccessible to the public at large. While their modernism arises out of the nature of their encounter with mass culture, that encounter frequently overturns commonly-held notions of the nature of modernism. Finally Strychacz explores his own world of academia and observes that the work of professional critics in the university reproduces the strategies of modernist writers.

In Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism Thomas Strychacz argues that modernist writers need to be understood both in their relationship to professional critics and in their relationship to an era and ethos of professionalism. In studying four modernist writers--Henry James, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos and Nathanael West--Strychacz finds that contrary to what most studies suggest, modernist writers (in the period of 1880-1940) are thoroughly caught up in the ideas and expressive forms of mass culture rather than opposed to them. Despite this, modernist writers seek to distinguish their ideas and styles from mass culture, particularly by making their works esoteric. In doing so, modernist writers are reproducing one of the main tenets of all professional groups, which is to gain social authority by forming a community around a difficult language inaccessible to the public at large. While their modernism arises out of the nature of their encounter with mass culture, that encounter frequently overturns commonly-held notions of the nature of modernism. Finally Strychacz explores his own world of academia and observes that the work of professional critics in the university reproduces the strategies of modernist writers.