Commodities and Literature

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Sudesh Mishra (University of the South Pacific) Caitlin Vandertop (University of Warwick)

Commodities and Literature

Sudesh Mishra (University of the South Pacific), Caitlin Vandertop (University of Warwick)

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English

Cambridge University Press
09 October 2025

Literary theory; Literary studies: post-colonial literature; Food & society; Feminism & feminist theory; Environmentalist thought & ideology

Series: Cambridge Critical Concepts

Global commodities, from tea and sugar to coal and oil, have had an enduring presence in literary texts. Commodity cultures have also shaped literary ones, from the early influence of the literary coffeehouse to the serial novels facilitated by print's own emergence as a mass commodity. This book offers an accessible overview of the many intersections between literature and commodities. Tracing the stories of goods as diverse as coffee, rum, opium, guano, oil and lithium, as they appear across a range of texts, periods, areas, and genres, the chapters bring together existing scholarship on literature and commodity culture with new perspectives from world-literary, postcolonial and Indigenous studies, Marxist and feminist criticism, the environmental and energy humanities, and book history. How, this volume asks, have commodities shaped literary forms and modes of reading? And how has literature engaged with the world-making trajectories and transformations of commodities?

Edited by: Sudesh Mishra (University of the South Pacific), Caitlin Vandertop (University of Warwick)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Weight: 647g
ISBN: 9781009432320
ISBN 10: 100943232X
Series: Cambridge Critical Concepts
Pages: 362
Publication Date: 09 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

List of Contributors; Acknowledgements; Reading Commodities: An Introduction Caitlin Vandertop and Sudesh Mishra; Part I. Origins: Commodity Fictions: 1. Tea and the silk roads of world literature Wen-chin Ouyang; 2. The travels of texts and coffee in early modern culture Natalya Din-Kariuki; 3. Fossil fuels and the fiction of extraction Elizabeth Carolyn Miller; 4. (Post)colonial books as commodity and anti-commodity Russell West-Pavlov; Part II. Developments: Commodity Worlds: 5. The commodity frontiers of world-literature: coal and soy Michael Niblett; 6. The devil's metal: tin and the ecologies of commodity criticism Chris Campbell; 7. Commodifying care: migrant literature and materialist feminism Kate Houlden; 8. Kinship and indigenous anti-commodities Artemis Caine and Megan Kuster; Part III. Applications: Commodity Genres: 9. Sugar: literature's bitter, bitter commodity Sudesh Mishra; 10. The (In)significance of rum Jennifer P. Nesbitt; 11. Opium's imperial intimacies Julia Kuehn; 12. Guano and the fictions of fertile islands Caitlin Vandertop; 13. Water in world literature Bonnie Etherington; 14. From Napoleon to MacArthur: the story of SPAM Anurag Subramani; 15. Oil, commodity frontiers and the materials of the road novel Myka Tucker-Abramson; 16. Lithium in the web of life Kate Montague.

Sudesh Mishra has received an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship, the Harri Jones Memorial Prize for Poetry, an Asialink Residency in India, the Ratu Sir Kamisese Mara Fellowship (Otago University) and an Erskine Canterbury Fellowship (Canterbury University). He was awarded a New Horizons Fellowship (Tubingen University) for 2024-2025. Caitlin Vandertop is an associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. She was previously based at the University of the South Pacific and the University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Modernism in the Metrocolony: Urban Cultures of Empire in Twentieth Century Literature (Cambridge University Press, 2021).