Book Launch: Thomas Travers, Peripheralizing DeLillo: Surplus Populations, Capitalist Crisis and the Novel

Drawing on theories that capital, rather than the bourgeoisie, is the displaced subject of the novel, Peripheralizing DeLillo investigates DeLillo’s representation of a fully commodified social world and re-evaluates Marxist accounts of the novel and its philosophy of history. Deploying an innovative re-periodisation, the monograph considers the evolution of DeLillo’s aesthetic forms as they register and encode one of the crises of contemporary historicity: the secular dynamics through which a society organised around waged work tends towards conditions of under- and unemployment. Situating DeLillo within global histories of uneven and combined development, the book explores how DeLillo’s treatment of capital and labour, affect and narration, reconfigures debates around realism and modernism. The DeLillo that emerges from this study is no longer an exemplary postmodern writer, but a composer of capitalist epics, a novelist drawn to peripheral zones of accumulation, zones of social death whose surplus populations his strives to re-historicise, if not re-dialecticise, as subjects of history.

For this book launch, Thomas Travers will be in discussion with David Cunningham (University of Westminster). He will provide a brief overview of the project, summarise its key theses, as well as contextualising the book within Marxist literary studies more broadly. 

• Thomas Travers is an independent researcher based in London. Tom’s first monograph, Peripheralizing DeLillo was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 and articles have also appeared in Textual Practice.
• David Cunningham is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster and a longstanding editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. He has published widely on aesthetics, modernism and the theory of the novel.

Thomas Travers is an independent researcher based in London. Tom’s first monograph, Peripheralizing DeLillo was published by Bloomsbury in 2022 and articles have also appeared in Textual Practice.


David Cunningham is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Westminster and a longstanding editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. He has published widely on aesthetics, modernism and the theory of the novel.