Post-millennial American and British finance-crisis fiction

Scholars have observed an unprecedented upsurge in fictional creation with realist aesthetics in the core economies as a cultural response to the 2001 and especially the 2007-8 financial crashes. This dissertation examines American and British finance-crisis fiction relating to realist aesthetics, in the form of novels and films produced in the wake of the two post-millennial financial crises. The examination adopts a dual-track approach to; (i) showing particularities in the cultural representation of socioeconomic conditions and crisis experiences, and, in connection with the recent rise of realism, the ways of performing what has sometimes been reserved for the role of (post)modernism or rendered as burdens of realism; such as representing systemic totality and carrying out class critiques and presenting alternative imaginaries, and, (ii) demonstrating the denaturalising force of mainstream economic and neoliberal assumptions regarding finance, financialisation, and financial crisis. To investigate cultural dissent and class struggle, this research highlights the necessity for the economic and financial turn of cultural studies and examines the subject texts, using a strategically created critical framework called the ‘salto mortale exchange framework’. This approach makes it possible to understand and interpret financialisation and financial crashes via utilising exchange mode-based Marxian theoretics, whilst also offering an alternative critical framework to that of cultural economic criticism. The research clarifies that the post-millennial finance-crisis fiction expresses changed understandings regarding finance and crisis, in conjunction with the transformation of financialised socioeconomic conditions into the twenty-first century. It also details how, with its realist aesthetics, the finance-crisis fiction performs as an evaluative critique for the crises, as well as for capitalist dynamics as a whole; such as (i) registering the financial crash as a long crisis innate to capitalism by illuminating incongruous temporalities of economic and cultural fixes; (ii) registering finance and the capitalist system as a crisis regime in its systemic critique of the historicity of national financialisation and associated world-systemic movement; (iii) revitalising class discussion; and, (iv) asserting the need for an alternative, non-capitalist global society. The research shows that such representations discontent, delegitimate, and denaturalise mainstream economics and neoliberal conjectures, such as assuming a more equal and classless society; normalising crisis as a deviated dent of supposed perpetual capitalist development; auspicious visioning of investor subjectivity and self-entrepreneurship; and the ultimate collective prosperity and a civilised growth of the world economy through capitalist logics and financialisation. The particularities of the post-millennial finance-crisis fiction addressed in this research position those fictions as a part of a new cultural front – a class struggle that inflects the capitalist revolution, characterising the contemporary phase of neoliberalism