This chapter describes the critical and speculative capacities of the Occupy novel, or contemporary novels that represent Occupy Wall Street and the Occupy movement more broadly. It argues that such fiction represents the financialization of everyday life, that is, the colonization of personal life and political subjectivity by Wall Street or finance capital. In doing so, it returns the question of social class to the center of US political debates. However, the Occupy novel also speculates on the possibilities of postcapitalist social life; it treats Occupy Wall Street as prefiguring new kinds of economic relations and social conducts. The chapter frames the Occupy novel in terms of its predecessor, the fiction of the post-2008 financial recession (“crunch lit”). Whereas crunch lit diagnoses financialization as a problem of households (personal debt, family crisis, and so on), the Occupy novel asks whether literature (and art in general) might have the capacity to engage in social struggle, to imagine new forms of public life.

A long critical history of the realist novel has worked to solidify a set of relations in which realism, liberal ideology, and the construction of a liberal subject all go hand in hand. Such a tight association between text and world and text and ideology tends to predetermine not only what the novel can say but who its subjects can be. What might happen were we to disentangle these generic and political ties, which circumscribe our role as readers of the realist novel, and, most significantly, shrink the worlds of these novels? Via Raymond Williams’s concept of keywords and their ability to pry open meaning rather than solidify it, this chapter argues for a far richer history of realism in alternative accounts of the realist novel that return to classical realism to read it anew or turn to so-called peripheral realisms to expand its purview and its politics beyond the confines of British imperial culture and liberal ideology. It proposes a dialectical approach to reading realism that allows the realist novel to surprise us by how it goes about knowing the world and what it can tell us about the world.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

The chapter analyses the person protected by privacy rights as a political person instead of an individual in charge of their own affairs.