eBook

Figures of finance capitalism : writing, class, and capital in the age of Dickens

Knezevic, Borislav

2003,2004

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Subject: Capitalism and literature / Capitalism and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century / Capitalism in literature / Capitalists and financiers in literature / English fiction / English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism / Finance in literature / Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron, 1800-1859 -- Views on capitalism / Social classes in literature
• ISBN: 0415943183, 9780415943185