Taking account of the New Economic Criticism: an historical introduction

When we organized a panel called “The New Economic Criticism” for the 1991 Midwest Modern Language Association (MMLA) convention, we were naming a phenomenon that we weren’t entirely sure existed. Certainly there was no movement that called itself “New Economic Criticism”; in giving it a name, we were responding to our perception of an emerging body of literary and cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms, models and tropes. Fortunately for us, this nascent movement took a firm hold in the 1990s, yielding exciting new work by both new and veteran critics, and establishing itself as one of the most promising areas of research in literary and cultural studies.