"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"--
Series Statement
American literature readings in the twenty-first century
Underwriting the Contemporary -- Missing Persons: Melancholy As Symptom in Less Than Zero, The Rules of Attraction and The Informers -- An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in American Psycho -- Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama -- 21st Century Gothic (or Post-9/11 Fatalism): Self-Parody, Reification and the Becoming Real of Cultural and Authorial Fictions in Lunar Park -- The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conflict in Imperial Bedrooms.