works to argue that his fiction, through the technique of underwriting, offers a new politics of literature. Dealing with his entire body of work to date, from Less Than Zero to Imperial Bedrooms, the study provides original readings of the writer’s equivocal engagement with American culture. Reading Ellis’s novels in relation to contemporary political, philosophical and aesthetic concerns, Colby recasts him as a social critic and a subversive literary figure who enables us to think differently about the cultural climates of the 1980s, 1990s, and the first decade of the twenty-first century.

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