This book offers a trenchant critique of many influential tirades against globalization. It starts by challenging the basic assumption of much antiglobalization polemic, first that the exponential increase in the commercialization of everyday life is necessarily the sign of the triumph of corporate capitalism, and second that this process is necessarily a bad thing. Annesley's study of the some of the myths of globalization – the fictions of globalization in his title – has its intellectual roots in the cultural-studies attack on the Frankfurt School's gloomy account of the tendency of mass culture to turn its consumers into passive zombies. Instead of apathetic dupes robotically consuming corporate brands, people can potentially find a sense of community and utopian promise in the new forms of identity thrown up as the by-products of economic globalization. Annesley's distinctive contribution to this rethinking of the perils of mass culture is his willingness to explore how globalization is imagined through a reading of a wide range of recent fiction (predominantly American) that has been preoccupied with the fears and fantasies of a globalizing world. His focus is not on the way that his chosen novels reflect or distort the reality of globalization, but on the way that they reshape the discourses of globalization. Through readings of novels by writers such as Paul Beatty, Brett Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, Alex Garland, Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Arundhati Roy and Sandra Cisneros (and many others along the way), Annesley offers consistently insightful considerations of the dynamic relationship between culture and the market, and he repeatedly shows how the opposition between the commodified and the uncommodified, held by both doom-mongers and utopians in the globalization debate, is untenable on closer inspection. For Annesley (echoing Fredric Jameson's work on postmodernism), any cultural stance of opposition must arise from within the market, and we must therefore learn to tune in to the creative meanings of consumer culture rather than merely lament its ubiquity.

Fictions of Globalization looks in particular at the links between ethnicity, identity and consumption; the dance of rebellion and cooptation that results from the intense commodification of everyday life; dreams of escape from consumerism; and tourism. With its focus on the underlying economic dynamics of cultural change, this book offers a compelling alternative to other studies of recent American fiction that have tended to see postmodernism as the defining term. In a tour-de-force reading of Moby-Dick as the tale of an emerging global industry of whale oil production, Annesley even suggests that the engagement with the logic of globalization has been of vital concern throughout the history of American literature. This follows from his conviction that too many antiglobalization tracts are unnecessarily apocalyptic in their assumption that the process of globalization is a very recent phenomenon. As Annesley's previous study of “blank fiction” demonstrated, he is a fine reader of contemporary American writing. Annesley's conclusions are always engaging and his work will once again become central to debates in the field.