Title: Fictions of finance: exploring the literary critique of American capitalism

Authors: Queen Sarkar

Addresses: School of Economics and Commerce, Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT), Bhubaneswar, India

Abstract: The 2008 financial crisis underscored the fragility and structural inequalities of contemporary capitalism, challenging assumptions of a self-regulating market and foregrounding the speculative foundations of the American economic system (Tett, 2009). In this context, The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel (2020) by Jacques-Henri Coste and Vincent Dussol offers a significant transdisciplinary framework for examining the relationship between capitalism and fiction, an area that remains insufficiently explored. This paper addresses this gap by applying the concepts of 'fictitious capital', 'working fictions', and the 'economic novel' to Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis (2003), Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic (2010), and Sebastian Faulks 's A Week in December (2009). Through qualitative literary analysis, the study demonstrates how fiction critically engages with economic power structures and high lights its pedagogical value for economics education.

Keywords: American capitalism; literature; fictitious capital; working fictions; economics novel; humanities; fiction; economics; pluralism; economics education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJPEE.2026.156032

International Journal of Pluralism and Economics Education, 2026 Vol.16 No.2, pp.224 - 244

Received: 25 Jul 2024
Accepted: 15 Oct 2025
Published online: 01 Sep 2026 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article