Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-t6hkb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-13T22:10:21.888Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 3 - “The Occult Logic of ‘Market Forces’”

Iain Sinclair’s Post-Big Bang London

from Part II - The Phantasmagorias of Contemporary Finance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2019

Paul Crosthwaite
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
Get access

Summary

This chapter argues that a logic of fiduciary exchangeability finds its most sustained and versatile expressions in the work of the celebrated London writer Iain Sinclair. Sinclair’s work of the 1990s is both a crucial signal of a deepening intimacy between experimental and genre writing that has become all the more pronounced over the past two decades, and a leading-edge example of the techniques of market metafiction so prevalent today. The chapter reads Sinclair’s novel Downriver (1991), published in the wake of the Thatcherite transformation of the City of London’s financial services sector, as exploring what happens to structures of fiduciary circulation when they are pushed to – and beyond – their limits. The reading of the ostensibly non-fictional Lights Out for the Territory (1997) as an exercise in the “hermeneutics of speculation,” meanwhile, argues for the constitutive roles of faith and belief even in texts that apparently ground themselves in the real and material, in the process challenging the homology between literary realism and precious metal that is a basic premise of much key work in the New Economic Criticism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2019

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
×