Capitalist literary criticism?

For those wishing a deeper—or at least more academic—understanding of some famous piece of literature, a "Case Studies in Literary Criticism" volume on it almost certainly exists, and almost certainly includes a section on "Marxist criticism and X" (Madame Bovary, or whatever), alongside sections on feminist criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, and so on. In my days of dogmatic slumber, I would see these lists and think, oh, yes, those are the varieties of criticism. But now those lists strike me as quite strange. Psychoanalytic criticism draws on Freud's theory of the mind; it assumes that his theory can help us better understand literature. But it can only help if it is true. And it is, to say the least, controversial. There are competing theories of the mind out there, which might be true instead. How come none of those alternatives has generated a school of literary criticism? Similarly Marxism—my focus here—is, among other things, a thesis about which form of economic organization is most just. Under capitalism, the idea goes, the “means of production” (factory equipment, for example) are privately owned, and employers exploit their workers, paying them less than they deserve. Under socialism, by contrast, the workers would collectively own the equipment, and this wouldn’t happen. (This is middle-school level Marxism, but it is good enough for here.) Plenty of people disagree, thinking that capitalism is better than socialism. So why is there no literary criticism practiced from that point of view?

It turns out there is. Literature & the Economics of Liberty: Spontaneous Order in Culture, edited by Paul Cantor and Stephen Cox, recently floated onto my radar screen, and is a kind of manifesto for an anti-Marxist, pro-capitalist literary criticism. They ask,

Might forms of economic thinking sympathetic to free markets be more helpful in analyzing literature than Marxism, with its unrelenting hostility to capitalism?

Maybe!