At a Q&A that followed a Toronto screening of Little Men (2016), a film about two families’ battle over a lease and its impact on the lives of its central protagonists, director Ira Sachs reflected on the modern-day struggle of many families to remain in the middle class. Sachs’s film speaks to the primacy of economics in discourse. Recent scholarship has shown the value of reading film and literature in terms of economics. The enormously influential work of David Graeber, Mary Poovey, Margot C. Finn, Julian Hoppit, Sandford Borins, Audrey Jaffe, Margaret Atwood, and others have opened up new avenues for thinking about money and the humanities. This special issue aims both to consolidate and to advance criticism in literature, film, philosophy, and cultural studies by attending to some incarnations of debt and analyzing their wider implications.

Abstracts of 250 words are invited on any aspect of economics as represented in literature, film, comics, and other media. Suitable papers will be published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed e-journal Literature Compass (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1741-4113).

Possible themes and topics:

• Capitalism
• Capital
• Inheritance
• Faith
• Credibility
• Chance
• Marxism
• Interest
• Commerce
• Trade
• Liberalism
• Finances
• Housing
• Rent
• Mortgage
• Banks
• Credit
• Debit
• Ranking
• Poverty
• Labour
• Forgiveness
• Cash
• Stocks
• Forgery
• Political Economy
• Colonialism
• Wealth

The first deadline for submissions is January 15, 2020.
Queries and proposals may be directed to editors Dr.s Tom Ue at ue_tom@hotmail.com and Philip Smith at philipsmithgraduate@gmail.com.