This is the first book to consider how contemporary literature has been involved in and shaped by the vocabularies and initiatives that characterize the creative economy. It considers how longstanding ideas about literature and literary writers have informed creative-economy theories and policies, and examines how writers have articulated their complicity with and distance from various facets of the placement of art in instrumental service to the economy. Creative-economy policy has presented artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managing work, has advocated using the presence of ... More

This is the first book to consider how contemporary literature has been involved in and shaped by the vocabularies and initiatives that characterize the creative economy. It considers how longstanding ideas about literature and literary writers have informed creative-economy theories and policies, and examines how writers have articulated their complicity with and distance from various facets of the placement of art in instrumental service to the economy. Creative-economy policy has presented artists as models of contentedly flexible and self-managing work, has advocated using the presence of cultural workers and institutions as a means of increasing property values, and has supported racial and ethnic diversity as a good way to grow cultural markets and foster an inclusive society of active cultural consumers. Critics of these phenomena have lamented that such linkages of culture, economy, and governance are serving neoliberal capitalism, and have said that celebration of an autonomous cultural realm and its ostensibly freely creative individual workers has become a saleable feature of mainstream cultural markets. This book places contemporary literature within this fraught context, arguing that writers tend to fixate on how their own gestures of refusal of participation in the creative economy have become crucial features of that very economy's dynamic evolution.