{"product_id":"9781452934136","title":"Capital Fictions: The Literature of Latin America's Export Age","description":"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eBetween 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. \u003ci\u003eCapital Fictions \u003c\/i\u003einvestigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America’s first major wave of capitalist modernization.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eUsing an innovative blend of literary and economic analysis and drawing from a rich interdisciplinary archive, Ericka Beckman provides the first extended evaluation of Export Age literary production. She traces the emergence of a distinct set of fictions, fantasies, and illusions that accompanied the rise of export-led, dependent capitalism. These “capital fictions” range from promotional pamphlets for Guatemalan coffee and advertisements for French fashions, to novels about stock market collapse in Argentina and rubber extraction in the Amazon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBeckman explores how Export Age literature anticipated some of the key contradictions faced by contemporary capitalist societies, including extreme financial volatility, vast social inequality, and ever-more-intense means of exploitation. Questioning the opposition between culture and economics in Latin America and elsewhere, \u003ci\u003eCapital Fictions\u003c\/i\u003e shows that literature operated as a powerful form of political economy during this period. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"University of Minnesota Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47128673616112,"sku":"9781452934136","price":14.49,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781452934136_p0.jpg?v=1763848176","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781452934136","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}