English Language & Literature

The creative industries, an important means of economic development in the post-industrial UK, position culture as an engine that generates wealth, that encourages social cohesion, and that helps to brand distinct regions for export and consumption. Yet their relevance to contemporary literature has not yet been subject to sustained study. This article lays some groundwork for new inquiry by thinking about writers as members of a creative class. In fact they may exemplify it, as aspects of how they work, live, and value their own autonomy have proven particularly useful to current post-industrial mandates. The idea of the autonomy of the arts has become one rationale behind their use as a plank in the construction of a brand-based visitor economy. Brand UK is meant to strengthen diplomatic ties, encourage corporate investment, and win the loyalty of global citizenconsumers whose appreciation for artistic freedom should guarantee their love for the products, services, and ideals that originate in the UK. Thus the arts' ostensible freedom is emphasized, and must seem viable, for them to be available for conscription into post-industrial government and corporate mandates. Meanwhile new economic applications for the arts influence the value, production and authority of new writing. They also affect its meaning, because writers tend to work against -by self-consciously highlighting -instrumental uses of their texts and of their cultural cachet. This means a notable and productive tension has arisen, as writers' attachment to their separation from corporate and state prerogatives, often reinforced in their literature, may be precisely what guarantees continued instrumental value.

Recent World Bank policy calls culture an 'underdeveloped resource' in many countries, specifying that it 'gives value' to a region's economy, whether through attracting attention to an urban centre or encouraging investment in a heritage hub. 2 Northern Irish culture has been instrumentalised in just this way. It is recruited to do work for a range of communityrelations projects, from multicultural initiatives to schemes encouraging civic participation, while also being asked to foster economic growth and promote urban improvement. According to the World Bank these two aspects of a culture's expediency are intimately related. Improved civic relations are encouraged by, and productive of, multinational capital flows. Northern Ireland fits its model. Its culture is being charged with managing social relationships in a way akin to what George Yú dice argues is unfolding within underdeveloped non-European locales, where governments invest in the notion that 'culture produces the patterns of trust, cooperation, and social interaction that result in a more vigorous economy, more democratic and effective government, and fewer social problems'. As the capitalisation of culture within post-industrial economies is one frame for emerging forms of creativity, Northern Irish writers make an ideal subject for understanding how state and corporate investment in culture's expediency intersects with the selfconsciousness of those working under the aegis of one particular regional brand. Awareness of the status and value of the heritage product is influencing the content of art in the region, and Glenn Patterson's 1995 novel Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain is exemplary in addressing this issue, as it stages and interprets the work involved in making a troubled heritage operative and profitable. In this essay I argue that the novel conflates theme parks as places devoted to entertainment and heritage sites and practices that are ostensibly concerned with commemorating, safeguarding, and transmitting history, in order to distinguish these from some more legitimate record of a given culture's traumatic past. I also map this distinction onto the relationship between the work of the artist and that of the heritage practitioner or 'content creator', imagining what special purchase literature might have in relation to an industry charged with memorialising a dissonant past.

As an intellectual and literary icon for a new millenium, Dave Eggers has approached the question of success and status as an "outsider," maintaining an "anti-establishment" stance even as he himself has been swept up into fame, both as a writer and publisher. In the following essay, Sarah Brouillette analyzes Eggers' "economic disavowal" and shifts critical attention to other economies and hierarchies in which Eggers' works participate. Because Eggers' mission attempts to deal with some of the issues brought forward in our own "manifesto" (published in this issue), Brouillette's discussion is especially important for readers of Reconstruction. We invite readers to bring their thoughts and ideas about these economies to our message boards.

Clover for helping me to think about the material below.) This paper is a very cursory exploration of neoliberalism as a concept. It is impossible to survey the vast amount of work on this topic. There are three things I hope to do instead: mention some key currents, articulate where I find the term more and less useful as an attempt to grasp contemporary social reality, and consider what the rise of reference to neoliberalism itself indexes.