Book contents
- Commodities and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Commodities and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Reading Commodities
- Part I Origins
- Part II Developments
- Chapter 5 The Commodity Frontiers of World-Literature
- Chapter 6 The Devil’s Metal
- Chapter 7 Commodifying Care
- Chapter 8 Kinship and Indigenous Anti-Commodities
- Part III Applications
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 5 - The Commodity Frontiers of World-Literature
Coal and Soy
from Part II - Developments
Published online by Cambridge University Press: aN Invalid Date NaN
Book contents
- Commodities and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Commodities and Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Reading Commodities
- Part I Origins
- Part II Developments
- Chapter 5 The Commodity Frontiers of World-Literature
- Chapter 6 The Devil’s Metal
- Chapter 7 Commodifying Care
- Chapter 8 Kinship and Indigenous Anti-Commodities
- Part III Applications
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter examines the literary registration of the life- and environment-making dynamics of commodity frontiers. It focuses on fictional representations of the contemporary soy frontier in Argentina and the former coal-mining districts of North East England. Specifically, the chapter considers Samanta Schweblin’s Distancia de rescate (Fever Dream, 2014), described by the author as Argentina’s first glyphosate novel, alongside Benjamin Myer’s Pig Iron (2012), which registers the socioecological fallout from the collapse of the coal frontier in County Durham. Placing both novels in the context of earlier depictions of the agricultural and industrial frontiers of Argentina and North East England, I show how, despite the very different geopolitical situations to which they respond, Schweblin’s and Myer’s narratives share certain thematic, stylistic, and formal likenesses in their mediation of the volatile and violent dynamics of commodity frontiers.
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- Commodities and Literature , pp. 99 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
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