Exit Capitalism re-examines key moments of British cultural and literary history, analysing how the decline of the socialist ideal and the emergence of endgame capitalism helped to produce both modern theory and cultural studies as academic fields.
Exit Capitalism explores a new path for cultural studies and re-examines key moments of British cultural and literary history. Simon During argues that the long and liberating journey towards democratic state capitalism has led to an unhappy dead-end from which there is no imaginable exit.
Simon During teaches at the English Department of Johns Hopkins University. He is also a Professoral Fellow at the School of Culture and Communications at the University of Melbourne. His most recent books are Modern Enchantments: the cultural power of secular magic (2002) and Cultural Studies: a critical introduction (2005). He is also the editor of the three editions of the Cultural Studies Reader.
Introduction Part 1: Modernizing the English Literary Field 1. Church, State and Modernization: Literature as Gentlemanly Knowledge after 1688 2. Quackery, Selfhood and the Emergence of the Modern Cultural Marketplace 3. Interesting: the Politics of the Sympathetic Imagination Part 2: Towards Endgame Capitalism: Literature, Theory, Culture 4. World Literature, Stalinism and the Nation: Christina Stead as Lost Object 5. Socialist Ends: the Emergence of Academic Theory in Postwar Britain 6. Completing Secularism: the Mundane in the Neo-Liberal Era 7. Refusing Capitalism? Theory and Cultural Studies after 1968