Special issue of Studies in Canadian Literature Neoliberal Environments
Edited by Tania Aguila-Way, Kit Dobson, and Nicole Shukin
In his 2011 book Anne of Tim Hortons: Globalization and the Reshaping of Atlantic-Canadian Literature, the late Herb Wyile pushed back against neoliberal ideologies through readings of literary texts that, in his view, countered “the mobility, deracination, and sense of placelessness that characterize our highly technological, globalized consumer society.” Following Wyile’s cue, this special issue asks: how do literary and cultural texts counter or conform to neoliberalism? How do they respond to environmental challenges in an age shaped by global capital? Neoliberalism is here understood in the broadest sense, offered by Wendy Brown, as a “governing rationality in which everything is ‘economized’,” remaking human as well as nonhuman social and material lives into various species of capital (Undoing the Demos).