NARRATIVES OF CAPITALISM AND CONSUMER CULTURE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH LITERATURE: A BUSINESS AND SOCIETY PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

This study explores how contemporary English literature maps, critiques, and resists the pervasive socio-economic transformations of late capitalism and consumer culture. Utilizing a "Business and Society" academic perspective synthesized with Marxist cultural theory, the paper examines how modern prose fiction exposes the fundamental structural limits of market logic, corporate rationality, and voluntary Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) frameworks. Moving beyond standard economic contextualizations, the analysis demonstrates how contemporary novelists employ diverse narrative strategies to interrogate a widening "legitimacy gap" driven by financial exploitation, systemic precarity, and biopolitical commodification. Through a comparative textual matrix spanning the metropolitan West to postcolonial landscapes, the article evaluates key works including Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, John Lanchester’s Capital, Sebastian Faulks’s A Week in December, Robert Harris’s The Fear Index, J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, Moni Mohsin’s the Diary of a Social Butterfly, and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger. These narratives trace the totalizing reach of "capitalist realism"—from the algorithmic automation of high-frequency finance and the hyperreal tribalism of suburban consumer fascism to the adaptive reinforcement of feudal-patriarchal hierarchies in postcolonial spaces. Ultimately, this study demonstrates that contemporary literature functions as a vital site of counter-hegemonic cultural critique and an imaginative laboratory, testing the boundaries of political imagination and underscoring the urgent necessity of robust, multi-actor public frameworks over voluntary, firm-centric governance.