This book analyses the impact of economic informality on the novel form across the modern world-system, looking specifically at works by Antonio de Almeida, Machado de Assis, Dany Laferrière, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Nadine Gordimer, and Masande Ntshanga. It sees the representation of informal economies as a structural homology of world-literature. In chapters on the figure of the agregado in the nineteenth-century Brazilian novel; sex work in Haitian fiction; the politics of the informal economy in the post-apartheid South African novel; and Ngugi’s representation African occult...