Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-8kt4b Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-24T00:53:38.976Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 9 - American Literature and the Fiction of Corporate Personhood

from Part II - Contemporary Critical Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2022

Paul Crosthwaite
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Peter Knight
Affiliation:
University of Manchester
Nicky Marsh
Affiliation:
University of Southampton
Get access

Summary

This chapter examines how American literature has engaged with business corporations in general, and the legal fiction of corporate personhood in particular. There are few major novels about business corporations, because literary fiction has tended to concentrate on the moral dilemmas and social entanglements of individuals, rather than the more impersonal realm of economic activity. Yet the changing legal nature and increasing importance of corporations has forced some writers to rethink what it means to be human, creatively rethinking the relationship between individual and collective agency. The chapter considers three phases in the literary representation of corporations: as monster, as system, and as story. It uses as examples James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo (1831), Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1901), Sloan Wilson’s The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Richard Powers’s Gain (1998), and Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End (2007).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×