Abstract
The chapter first offers a detailed reading of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral as a contribution to the history of US business, the glove-making industry, Jewish immigrants, and American capitalism in general. The novel’s setting (Newark), its entrepreneurial characters, and its plot are analyzed from these perspectives. Also explored in this part is how the novel exposes the fictitiousness of the national narrative of entrepreneurship and the romance of American unity, two fictions powering the American model of capitalism.
The chapter then moves on to more general considerations as to how novels can be heuristic artifacts that provide an imagined counterfactual form of archive and historiography that has cognitive value.
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Notes
- 1.
Roland Barthes in The Rustle of Language, 1989, puts forth the concept of “effect of reality,” which is created by realistic details mentioned in the text and by the use of ekphrasis or description. The reality of the past is an effect created by a textual device establishing an extratextual relationship, an “illusory” correspondence, between a description in the text and a state of affairs in the past.
- 2.
A list might include Melville, Howells, Phelps, Dreiser, Norris, Lewis, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Roth, and Don DeLillo.
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Coste, JH. (2020). Revisiting Business History Through Capitalist Fiction: The Glove-Making Industry in Philip Roth’s American Pastoral. In: Coste, JH., Dussol, V. (eds) The Fictions of American Capitalism. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Culture and Economics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36564-6_16
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