eBook

Victorian Literature and Finance

O'Gorman, Francis

2007

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Oxford University Press,Oxford University Press, Incorporated,Oxford Univ. Press
• Subject: 1837-1901 / Authorship / Authorship -- Economic aspects -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century / Capitalism and literature / Capitalism and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century / Capitalism in literature / English and Anglo-Saxon literatures / English literature / English literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism / Finance in literature / Großbritannien / Literary Studies (19th Century) / Literary Theory and Cultural Studies / Literatur / Literature publishing / Literature publishing - Economic aspects - Great Britain - History - 19th century / Money in literature / Value in literature / Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• ISBN: 0191536008, 9780191536007, 0199281920, 9780199281923