This chapter offers a schematic overview of the many different ways in which scholars and theorists have thought about what exactly makes literature neoliberal. After introducing several representational and heuristic models, the chapter summarizes the economic and theoretical history of neoliberalism in the United States and then introduces a four-phase approach to conceptualizing the relationship between neoliberalism and literature. Identifying economic, political, sociocultural, and ontological features of neoliberalism, it offers brief readings of three US novels that foreground these distinct features. Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, which explores the intersection of finance capital and racial politics in 1980s New York City, helps us see neoliberalism as an economic and political phenomenon. Dana Spiotta’s Eat the Document, which worries about the aesthetic representation of revolutionary politics, reveals neoliberalism’s intrusion into the cultural domain. And Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad asks where meaning and value might be found in a world where art, language, and being have been captured by neoliberalism’s for-profit technologies. These three texts are exemplary neoliberal novels, but the differences among them also provide a fuller picture of the neoliberal novel as a literary phenomenon of the past four decades.

AT THE CONCLUSION OF Mason & Dixon's thirty-second chapter, Jeremiah Dixon receives a letter from his long-time mentor, William Emerson, who has entrusted Dixon with a watch of perpetual motion that never requires winding. Dixon has written to Emerson to report that the watch was swallowed by R.C., a member of the surveying party, and Emerson's reply bears the challenging post-script, “Time is the Space that may not be seen. —” (326). This essay reads Mason & Dixon as a literary attempt, not to render time visible, but to produce meaning from time itself. As such, Thomas Pynchon incorporates temporality into the narrative's production, not only writing about the historical interface between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, but also performing the historicity of that interface. To make meaning from time's perpetual motion, Pynchon employs a temporally parallactic narrative form (different narrators deliver the story from ostensibly different moments in time) that effects, for the reader, a semblance of experiential time. These narrative tricks superimpose linear and cyclical models of time into one textual form, and they allow Pynchon to write about time without sacrificing, by spatializing, time's temporality or history's historicity.