Bret Easton Ellis Underwriting the Contemporary [Paperback]

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.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

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 clich?s 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 l£8