Artwork by Lieke Verreussel, relation, ship (2025). Photo by Arne De Boever.
b2o: an online journal is an online-only, free-to-read, peer-reviewed journal published by the boundary 2 editorial collective, with a standalone Editorial Board.
This special issue was solicited for b2o: an online journal by Arne De Boever. The peer review process for all articles was facilitated by the special issue editors Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen, and by De Boever (for b2o: an online journal). All articles were prepared for publication by Dunst, Vermeulen, and De Boever.
Volume 7, Issue 3 (December 2025)
Special Issue: The Question of Literary Value
Special Issue editors: Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen
- Alexander Dunst and Pieter Vermeulen–The Question of Literature Value: An Introduction
- Günter Leypoldt–Understanding Literary Value Requires Institutional Ethnography
- Maria Mäkelä–Literary Value Emerges In and Against the Story Economy
- Pieter Vermeulen–Literary Value is Nonliterary Value
- Antje Kley–Literary Value Rests on Form
- Natalya Bekhta–Literary Value = the Value of the Novel
- Alexander Dunst–To Understand Literary Value Today, Look to Visual Culture
- Gerold Sedlmayr–Literature and Literary Studies Can Contribute to the Revaluation of Economic Value
- Nathan Taylor–Literature Isn’t Invaluable–But It Can Be Redundant
- Arne De Boever–Literary Value is Unexceptional
Contributor Biographies
Natalya Bekhta is Academy Research Fellow at Tampere University and Docent in Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She is the author of We-Narratives: Collective Storytelling in Contemporary Fiction (2020). Her recent work focuses on utopian imagination in the (former) ‘second-world’ literatures and the semi-peripheral novel. She is currently working on “A short history of Ukrainian utopia”, a genre-blending work of theory in the format of a comic book.
Arne De Boever teaches American Studies in the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. He is the author of numerous articles, reviews, and translations, as well as several books on contemporary fiction and philosophy. His most recent book is Post-Exceptionalism: Art After Political Theology (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Alexander Dunst is the author of Madness in Cold War America (2016) and The Rise of the Graphic Novel: Computational Criticism and the Evolution of Literary Value (2023) and has co-edited the volumes The World According to Philip K. Dick (2015), Empirical Comics Research (2018), and the forthcoming Mobilizing Medicine (2026). He is currently taking a break from academia, or at least trying to, in order to finish a book about his Nazi grandparents and contemporary memory culture.
Antje Kley is Professor of American Studies at FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg. With Dirk Niefanger, she co-directs the Research Training Group “Literature and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Differentiated Cultures”, funded since 2022 by the German Research Foundation. Her research investigates the history and cultural functions of US-American prose fiction and life writing, the relation between ethics and aesthetics, as well as literary knowledge production. Together with Aida Bosch she co-edited Literatur und mediale Öffentlichkeiten: Orientierende Fallstudien (open access 2025). She is currently working on a book project concerned with 21st century US-American narratives of the end of life entitled “Let’s Talk about Death”.
Günter Leypoldt is a Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Heidelberg. He is the author of Literature’s Social Lives: A Socio-Institutional History of Value (2025), and co-editor of Authority and Trust in US Culture and Society (2021). His essays appeared in such journals as American Journal of Cultural Sociology, American Literary History, Poetics, Modern Language Quarterly, New Literary History, Contemporary Literature, and Post45.
Maria Mäkelä, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Tampere University, Finland. Her publications deal with narrative theory, story economy, the digital literary sphere, social media, authorial ethos, fictionality, exemplarity, consciousness, voice, and realism. Her recent publications include The Routledge Companion to Narrative Theory (2022) co-edited with Paul Dawson, and the Poetics Today special issue “Critical Approaches to the Storytelling Boom” (2022), co-edited with Hanna Meretoja. She is consortium director of Authors of the Story Economy: Narrative and Digital Capital in the 21st-Century Literary Field (Research Council of Finland 2024–28).
Gerold Sedlmayr is Professor of English Literature at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. He is the author of Brendan Kennelly’s Literary Works: The Developing Art of an Irish Writer, 1959-2000 (2005), The Discourse of Madness in Britain, 1790-1815: Medicine, Politics, Literature (2010), and co-author of The Orphan in Fiction and Comics since the 19th Century (2018). Since 2019, he is one of the general editors of the Journal for the Study of British Cultures (JSBC). He has edited and co-edited various collections of essays and journal issues, and is a member of the research network ‘Methodologies of Economic Criticism’.
Nathan Taylor is Director of Research at the Frankfurt Humanities Center and teaches literature and aesthetics at the Goethe-University Frankfurt. He is the author of Fugitive Logistics: Unsettling the German Archive (Cornell University Press, forthcoming) and finishing a book titled Invaluable: German Literature and the Rise of the Value Form.
Pieter Vermeulen is a Professor of American and Comparative Literature at the University of Leuven, Belgium. He is the author of Contemporary Literature and the End of the Novel (2015) and Literature and the Anthropocene (2020), and a co-editor of, among other books, Institutions of World Literature (2015), Memory Unbound (2017), and, most recently, a special issue of the James Baldwin Review on the European afterlives of James Baldwin (2025).