In the introduction to this collection, Huehls and Greenwald Smith identify the singular challenge facing any work attempting to explore the relationship between literature and neoliberalism: the term's contested and controversial nature. The solution they offer reveals not only the structuring principles of the essay collection but also its particular contribution to scholarly debate on the matter.

As the editors note, in both popular and critical left-wing discourse, the term “neoliberalism” has seen a huge upswing in popularity in recent years, being used to diagnose and critique a whole range of societal ills. It has come to serve as a general signifier of our contemporary sociopolitical moment. Yet this capacity to encompass and unify a whole range of political phenomena has led to a backlash by critics arguing that the term is so broad as to be meaningless. Huehls and Greenwald Smith argue that the history of neoliberalism as a major political force can be divided into four stages. The economic phase starts in 1971 with Nixon unpegging the dollar from the gold standard; the political phase starts with Reagan and Thatcher as the political ideology of neoliberalism begins to come to the fore in the 1980s; the sociocultural phase comes in the 1990s, with economic rationality being absorbed into culture and cultural forms; and the ontological phase takes over during the 2000s, with neoliberalism simply being the structure in which we live, its dominance obviating the need for intentional support, commitment, or belief. These critical approaches take so many forms, write the editors, because each critic is addressing a different primary aspect/period of neoliberalism.

Despite some editorial qualifications, this explanation risks being overly schematic in its division of neoliberalism into specific periods and clear-cut phases, although this is understandable given the limited space available. The ideological–political order which now dominates has always been driven by a mix of contingency, convenience, and complexity as much as it has been by ideological certainty and coherent intent, as is evident from numerous histories of neoliberalism. Schematizing such a messy mix is a difficult task, but in core terms the editors do an admirable job. They provide precise if condensed details of the term's rise, opposition, key theoretical accounts, key historical periods, key elements, and key questions.

On its own, this introduction offers an overview that should be helpful to anyone seeking to understand the contemporary critical field. It provides a specificity to the term without hamstringing its capacity for broad use. But the introduction also gives the best explanation of the function and contribution of the collection as a whole. Each essay has its own interesting approach and focus, engaged with the ongoing debates of its relevant field. But combined together in this way, they contribute to a collective effort to answer far larger questions than may explicitly be addressed in each essay.

The four parts of the volume focus on neoliberalism and literary theory, form, representation, and institutions. The essays themselves, distinctive, well written, and provided by a star-studded cast of scholars in the field, do justice to the position articulated in the introduction. When diversity is such a structuring principle, giving an overview is difficult. They open with Walter Benn Michaels's analysis of the (very literal) contract fetishization that lies at the heart of Fifty Shades of Gray, and from there range from exploring how the individualized ideological logic of neoliberalism manifests in plots in popular fiction to debating the role of different forms of reading (symptomatic, affective, surface), from exploring the end of postmodernism to analysing the functioning of memoir and different styles of narration in the neoliberal era, from exploring market forces through statistically analysing the incidence of specific locations in contemporary literature to exploring the role of migrancy and childhood; they even explore the effect of market logic on the role of the author and the concept of literature itself. As promised, each addresses a different balance of economic, political, sociocultural and ontological factors in considering what it is that has shaped their particular objects of study.

Taken alone, each essay should be of great value to anyone studying its specific area of focus. Each offers an original and complex analysis engaged with the key questions of its field. Taken together, and in combination with the introduction, they give a cross-section of the current state of the scholarly debate around neoliberalism's literary legacy, both within texts and beyond them. As a whole, the collection goes a long way to filling out the broader picture of how we can conceptualize neoliberalism as humanities scholars, and how it has shaped and continues to shape our contemporary cultural world.