Allen Mendenhall is a writer, managing editor of Southern Literary Review, staff attorney to Chief Justice Roy S. Moore of the Supreme Court of Alabama, adjunct professor at Faulkner University Thomas Goode Jones School of Law, and doctoral candidate in English at Auburn University.
Allen’s most recent publication is a work of libertarian literary theory and criticism, Literature and Liberty:
Anthologies of literary theory and criticism have sections devoted principally to Marxism but not to other modes of economics, including free-market economics or capitalism. It is as if thinkers as wide-ranging as Adam Smith and F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises have little to offer literary studies. This book does not attempt to create a robust, comprehensive, or integrated theory of free-market economics, but to leave behind an index of ideas and approaches to libertarian or free-market literary theory and criticism that might influence students and scholars. With chapters on Geoffrey of Monmouth, Shakespeare, E.M. Forster, Mark Twain, Emerson, and Henry Hazlitt, Literature and Liberty offers a range of options for what libertarian literary theory might look like. It seeks to diversify the franchise of literary studies to include libertarian and capitalist ideas.
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