Crisis and Criticism : Literary, Cultural and Political Essays, 20092021

Crisis and Criticism brings together a series of interventions from 2009 to 2021 engaging with the literary, cultural and political responses to the capitalist crisis of 2007–8. Challenging the tendency to treat crisis as natural and beyond human control, Benjamin Noys interrogates our cultural understanding of crisis and suggests the necessity of ruthless criticism of the existing world. While responses to crisis have retreated from the critical, choosing to inhabit apocalyptic fantasies instead, Noys makes a rousing argument that only a critical understanding of the causes of crisis within capitalism itself can promise their eventual overcoming.