Culture, Capital and Carnival : Modern Media and the Representation of Work

Culture, Capital and Carnival offers an interdisciplinary examination of how modern culture contextualises the values of labour. How do the stories we consume represent work and shape its meaning in our lives? How has the history of modern art, critique and cultural production negotiated the idea of labour and the behaviours and beliefs which give it legitimacy and coherence? Beginning with a critique of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the ‘carnivalesque’, Culture, Capital and Carnival examines a diverse array of multimedia texts from the era of modern capitalism – including a mixture of canonical and culturally impactful novels, short stories, non-fiction, films and TV sitcoms – and addresses the various ideological tensions surrounding the representation of work. Individual chapters look at how culture’s various attempts to ‘carnivalize’ the values of labour can be challenged and ask whether critical representations can also perpetuate the values they seek to negate. By extending the author’s previous work on the contemporary reinterpretation of Romanticism as an expansive modern phenomenon, Culture, Capital and Carnival adopts a radical critical perspective to explain how media products in the age of neoliberal capitalism can ‘carnivalize’ the values of modern capitalist labour even as they undermine economic and political freedom.