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This book reads the whole of Bret Easton Ellis´s oeuvre to date from Less Than Zero to Imperial Bedrooms and asks to what extent Ellis´s novels can be read as critiquing the cultural moments of which they are a part. Ellis´s work can be thought of as an enactment of a process of underwriting contemporary culture, which offers new paths of understanding and ways of critiquing the contemporary author´s place in the relations of production.

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Underwriting the Contemporary Missing Persons: Melancholy As Symptom in Less Than Zero , The Rules of Attraction and The Informers An Inner Critique: Commodity Fetishism, Systemic Violence and the Abstract Mutilated Subject in American Psycho Cloning the Nineties: Cultural Amnesia, Terrorism and Contemporary Iconoclasm in Glamorama 21st Century Gothic (or Post-9/11 Fatalism): Self-Parody, Reification and the Becoming Real of Cultural and Authorial Fictions in Lunar Park The Politics of Exposure: Unsafe Lines and Narratives of Conflict in Imperial Bedrooms

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"Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary is an accomplished and challenging book that, through a close reading of Ellis s oeuvre to date, attempts to correlate political and literary value in order to extract a new politics of literature. It is a timely and serious work on a very important author whose reputation is overshadowed by the celebrity of his debut novel and the infamy of American Psycho." - Scott Wilson, Professor in the School of Humanities, London Graduate School, Kingston University

"Colby provides a path-breaking reading and re-situation of Bret Easton Ellis s work, elegantly written and attentive to the rich paradoxes of his authorial persona and literary stance.With her elaboration of the underwritten as double-voiced critique, she moves us away from the clichés of the Blank Generation and gives us tools for an understanding of the slippery politics of contemporary fiction. Ellis emerges as a better and more dangerous writer than we know." - Tim Armstrong, Professor of Modern English and American Literature, Royal Holloway, University of London

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Georgina Colby is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster, UK.

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