Each era’s capitalist dynamics generate a corresponding novelistic form

Evidence

So, what is its cause? For more than a century, scholars have understood the novel and capitalism to have a very special relationship; because the novel is the literary form unique to capitalism, it uniquely mediates capitalist relations, propelled as it is by a dialectic of society and the individual, the exemplary and the exceptional, worldly details and astral wisdom. Thus, the early English novel confronts capitalist dynamics like enclosure and mercantilism through adventures of shipwreck and casting on to the marriage market; or the great nineteenth-century novel reckons with urbanization, revolution, and colonialism through large casts of characters jostling for social coherence; or the modernist novel contemplates total war and the global market through streams of consciousness and cinematic propulsion; or the postmodern novel stages complete commoditization through metafictional irony and pastiche. If there is transformation in the history of the novel in the twenty-first century, to what capitalist transformation does it correspond? — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 133

Categorization

• XREF: The framework is plainly Jamesonian — the homology of narrative form with historical modes of production — which the reader is tracking to judge Kornbluh’s structural debt to Jameson. — connects to: Shared-dreaming fiction encodes its era’s political economy, collective versus commercial. — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on…, 521
• QUESTION: Sets up the book’s core causal claim the reader must evaluate: what capitalist transformation does contemporary first-person immediacy correspond to?