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As the world has been reshaped since the 1970s by neoliberalism and globalization, increasing financial abstraction has presented a new political urgency for contemporary writers. Globalized finance, the return to Gilded Age levels of inequality, and the emergence of new technologies pose a similar challenge to the one faced by American social realists a century ago: making the virtualization of capitalism legible within the conventions of the realist novel. InThe Financial Imaginary, Alison Shonkwiler reads texts by Richard Powers, Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Teddy Wayne, and Mohsin Hamid to examine how fiction confronts the formal and representational mystifications of the economic. As Shonkwiler shows, these contemporary writers navigate the social, moral, and class preoccupations of American \"economic fiction\" (as shaped by such writers as William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser), even as they probe the novel's inadequacies to tell the story of an increasingly abstract world system. Drawing a connection from historical and theoretical accounts of financialization to the formal contours of contemporary fiction,The Financial Imaginaryexamines the persistent yet vexed relationship between financial representation and the demands of literary realism. It argues that the novel is essential to understanding our relation to the mystifications of abstraction past and present.

These essays break from decades of dominant \"postmodern\" readings of poetry, highlighting the 21st century renaissance in anticapitalist poetic activity, and forging new models for reading poems against the backdrop of capital's deep contradictions.

\"The Paper Age\" is the phrase coined by Thomas Carlyle in 1837 to describe the monetary and literary inflation of the French Revolution-an age of mass-produced \"Bank-paper\" and \"Book-paper.\" Carlyle's phrase is suggestive because it points to the particular substance-paper-that provides the basis for reflection on the mass media in much popular fiction appearing around the time of his historical essay. Rather than becoming a metaphor, however, paper in some of this fiction seems to display the more complex and elusive character of what Walter Benjamin evocatively calls \"the decline of the aura.\" The critical perspective elaborated by Benjamin serves as the point of departure for the readings of paper proposed inPaperwork.Kevin McLaughlin argues for a literary-critical approach to the impact of the mass media on literature through a series of detailed interpretations of paper in fiction by Poe, Stevenson, Melville, Dickens, and Hardy. In this fiction, he argues, paper dramatizes the \"withdrawal,\" as Benjamin puts it, of the \"here and now\" of the traditional work of art into the dispersing or distracting movement of the mass media.Paperworkseeks to challenge traditional concepts of medium and message that continue to inform studies of print culture and the mass media especially in the wake of industrialized production in the early nineteenth century. It breaks new ground in the exploration of the difference between mass culture and literature and will appeal to cultural historians and literary critics alike.

Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a patrician elite. This book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian middle-class social imagination by discussing a selection of major Victorian texts by Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray and Macaulay. In so doing, it draws on several new perspectives on British history, as offered in the work of historians such as Tom Nairn, David Cannadine, and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. Articulating the basic coordinates for a new sociology of mid-Victorian literature, Borislav Knezevic views texts through the prism of the mid-Victorian literary field and its negotiations of the contemporary field of power.

Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.

This book explores the relationship between Dickens's novels and the financial system. Elements of Dickens's work form a critique of financial capitalism. This critique is rooted in the difference between use-value and exchange-value, and in the difference between productive circulations and mere accumulation. In a money-based society, exchange-value and accumulation dominate to the point where they infect even the most important and sacred relationships between parts of society and individuals. This study explores Dickens's critique from two very different points of view. The first is philosophical, from Aristotle's distinction between \"chrematistic\" accumulation and \"economic\" use on money through Marx's focus on the teleology of capitalism as death. The second view is that of nineteenth-century financial journalism, of \"City\" writers like David Morier Evans and M. L. Meason,, who, while functioning as \"cheerleaders\" for financial capitalism, also reflected some of the very real \"dis-ease\" associated with capital formation and accumulation. The core concepts of this critique are constant in the novels, but the critique broadens and becomes more pessimistic over time. The ill effects of living in a money-based society are presented more as the consequences of individual evil in earlier novels, while in the later books they are depicted as systemic and pervasive. Texts discussed include Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend.

Victorian Britain offered the world an economic structure of unique complexity. The trading nation, at the heart of a great empire, developed the practices of advanced capitalism — currency, banking, investment, money markets, business practices and theory, intellectual property legislation — from which the financial systems of the contemporary world emerged. Cultural forms in Victorian Britain transacted with high capitalism in a variety of ways but literary critics interested in economics have traditionally been preoccupied either with writers' hostility to industrial capitalism in terms of its shaping of class, or with the development of consumerism. This book is the first extended study to take seriously the relationships between literary forms and those more complex discourses of Victorian high finance. The chapters move beyond the examination of literature that was merely impatient with the perceived consequences of capitalism to analyse creative relationships between culture and economic structures. Considering such topics as the nature of currency, women and the culture of investment, the profits of a modern media age, the dramatization of risk on the Victorian stage, the practice of realism in relation to business theory, the culture of speculation at the end of the century, and arguments about the uncomfortable relationship between literary and financial capital, this book sets new terms for understanding and theorizing the relationship between high finance and literary writing in the 19th century.

This book explores the relationship between Dickens’s novels and the financial system. Elements of Dickens’s work form a critique of financial capitalism. This critique is rooted in the difference between use-value and exchange-value, and in the difference between productive circulations and mere accumulation. In a money-based society, exchange-value and accumulation dominate to the point where they infect even the most important and sacred relationships between parts of society and individuals. This study explores Dickens’s critique from two very different points of view. The first is philosophical, from Aristotle’s distinction between \"chrematistic\" accumulation and \"economic\" use on money through Marx’s focus on the teleology of capitalism as death. The second view is that of nineteenth-century financial journalism, of \"City\" writers like David Morier Evans and M. L. Meason,, who, while functioning as \"cheerleaders\" for financial capitalism, also reflected some of the very real \"dis-ease\" associated with capital formation and accumulation. The core concepts of this critique are constant in the novels, but the critique broadens and becomes more pessimistic over time. The ill effects of living in a money-based society are presented more as the consequences of individual evil in earlier novels, while in the later books they are depicted as systemic and pervasive. Texts discussed include Nicholas Nickleby, A Christmas Carol, Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend . Introduction: Dickens's Evolving Critique of Financial Capitalism 1. \"I hold myself released from such hard bargains as these\": Nicholas Nickleby and \"Brotherly\" Capitalism 2. \"With what a strange mastery it seized him for itself\": The Conversion of the Financier in A Christmas Carol 3. \"Terribly wild rang the panic cry\": Finance, Panic and the Struggle for Life in Little Dorrit 4.\"Among the dying and the dead\": Metonymy and Finance Capitalism in Our Mutual Friend

This multidisciplinary collection of essays provides a means to appreciate the richness and variety of fictional portrayals of businesses and businesspersons. The works selected for examination reflect the variety of philosophical, political, economic, cultural, social, and ethical perspectives that have been found in American society over time.

Pride and Profit explores the ways in which Jane Austen's novels interact with the ideas of economist Adam Smith. Bohanon and Vachris show how Smithian perspectives on virtue are depicted in Austen's novels and how Smith's and Austen's perspectives reflect and define the bourgeois culture of the Enlightenment and industrial revolution.