This Introduction provides an overview of the key ways in which literature and economics intersect. It firstly considers how literary texts encode economic knowledge in metaphorical – and more broadly tropic – uses of economic vocabulary, and via styles and forms that stand in a “homological” relation to monetary and financial systems. It then explains how critics have understood the ongoing overlaps between literature and economics as “genres” of writing, which have continued to borrow conventions from one another, even as the discipline of economics has become increasingly technical and mathematical. The Introduction next addresses the ways in which literary texts register the economic pressures to which they are most directly exposed: namely, the pressures of literary consumption and the literary marketplace. It closes by showing how social scientists are increasingly turning to literature and literary studies for economic insights, and by highlighting the emergence of the Economic Humanities as an interdisciplinary research field to which the approaches covered in this Cambridge Companion have made defining contributions.

This chapter compares two generations of economic literary critics who, since the mid-1990s, have examined how literary texts intersect with racial capitalism. Like the authors they study, these scholars are less concerned with documenting the material consequences of racism than they are with interrogating the systemic logic of the sociocultural frameworks through which racialization is reproduced and racist policy is rationalized. The chapter specifically outlines the intersecting methodologies of these scholars and documents their efforts to show how literary texts often engage the language and logic of economic theory in ways that can destabilize racism’s ideological underpinnings. Beginning with the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s and ending with the emerging paradigm of the Economic Humanities, this chapter demonstrates that while the latter may better attend to the disciplinary specifics of economics than the former, it, like its predecessor, has yet to contend fully with the whiteness of the economic imaginary it takes as its subject.