Bret Easton Ellis

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. INTRODUCTION: Underwriting the Contemporary

   • Georgina Colby

   Pages 1-22

3. Missing Persons: Melancholy as Symptom in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers

   • Georgina Colby

   Pages 23-57

4. An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence, and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in American Psycho

   • Georgina Colby

   Pages 59-94

5. Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism, and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama

   • Georgina Colby

   Pages 95-129

6. Twenty-First-Century Gothic (or post-9/11 Fatalism): Self-Parody, Reification, and the Becoming Real of Cultural and Authorial Fictions in Lunar Park

   • Georgina Colby

   Pages 131-163

7. CODA: The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conflict in Imperial Bedrooms

   • Georgina Colby

   Pages 165-188

8. Back Matter

   Pages 189-228

   PDF

This book reads the whole of Bret Easton Ellis's oeuvre to date from Less Than Zero to Imperial Bedrooms and asks to what extent Ellis's novels can be read as critiquing the cultural moments of which they are a part. Ellis's work can be thought of as an enactment of a process of underwriting contemporary culture, which offers new paths of understanding and ways of critiquing the contemporary author's place in the relations of production.

• 42624
• America
• critique
• culture
• fiction
• Narrative
• novel

"Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary is an accomplished and challenging book that, through a close reading of Ellis s oeuvre to date, attempts to correlate political and literary value in order to extract a new politics of literature. It is a timely and serious work on a very important author whose reputation is overshadowed by the celebrity of his debut novel and the infamy of American Psycho." - Scott Wilson, Professor in the School of Humanities, London Graduate School, Kingston University

"Colby provides a path-breaking reading and re-situation of Bret Easton Ellis s work, elegantly written and attentive to the rich paradoxes of his authorial persona and literary stance.With her elaboration of the underwritten as double-voiced critique, she moves us away from the clichés of the Blank Generation and gives us tools for an understanding of the slippery politics of contemporary fiction. Ellis emerges as a better and more dangerous writer than we know." - Tim Armstrong, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London

Georgina Colby is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster, UK.

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