Litonomics

Abstract

In his campus novel Nice Work (2011/1988), David Lodge points to a certain affinity between the practice and rhetoric of high finance and the theoretical discourses central to the study of literature. From this point of view, and as, myself, a literary scholar who has tried to find ways to bring my own disciplinary training to bear on financial and economic topics, I am especially struck, in reading these four outstanding new books, by the strong element of ‘literarity’ that each displays — meaning not simply or necessarily a concern with literature as such, but with the problematics of language, rhetoric, narrative, metaphor, and semiosis that the study of literature opens out upon.