Few topics are as central to the American literary imagination as money. American writers' preoccupations with money predate the foundation of the United States and persist to the present day. Writers have been among the sharpest critics and most enchanted observers of an American social world dominated by the 'cash nexus'; and they have reckoned with imaginative writing's own deep and ambivalent entanglements with the logics of inscription, circulation, and valuation that define the money economy itself. As a dominant measure of value, money has also profoundly shaped representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. American literature's engagements with money and with directly related topics including debt, credit, finance, and the capitalist market are among Americanists' most prominent concerns. This landmark volume synthesizes and builds upon the abundance of research in the field to provide the first comprehensive mapping of money's crucial role over five centuries of American literary history.
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Provides the first comprehensive survey of money's crucial role in five centuries of American literary history.
List of Figures; Contributors; Introduction Paul Crosthwaite; Part I.
Origins:
1. Wealth and exchange in colonial American literature, 15161775
Amanda Louise Johnson;
2. The monetary cultures of the early nation Elizabeth
Hewitt; Part II. Histories:
3. Antebellum sensationalism; or, Melodramas of
the market David Anthony;
4. Race, money, and the figure of the slave Jeffory
A. Clymer;
5. Reckoning with money in the American renaissance Andrew Lawson;
6. Money and marriage in American literary realism Henry B. Wonham;
7.
Naturalism's financial sublime Jason Puskar;
8. Morality, modernism, and the
money question Nicky Marsh;
9. Loss and dispossession in American writing of
the great depression Melanie Benson Taylor;
10. Keeping up and falling down
in the suburbs Martin Dines;
11. Blackness and value from the Harlem
renaissance to the black arts movement Michael Germana;
12. The
counterculture and the culture of money Joanna Freer;
13. The logics and
Rhetorics of theft in 1970s feminist writing Melanie Waters;
14. Crisis
money: fiction, finance, and belief in an age of shocks Arne De Boever;
15.
Multiculturalism and the many meanings of money Eva Boesenberg;
16.
Capitalism and racial form in three contemporary US poets Christopher Chen;
17. Imagining and occupying wall street Christian P. Haines;
18. Making ends
meet in the gig economy: solidarity, cubicle nostalgia, and the contemporary
novel at the end Michelle Chihara; Part III. Alternatives:
19. Native
American literature and the persistence of the gift Sean Teuton;
20. Other
worlds and other monies Jo Lindsay Walton;
21. Performing currency:mMoney art
in America Emily Rosamond;
22. Free money? Literature, liberty, and
alternative currencies Paul Crosthwaite; Index.
Paul Crosthwaite is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (2024), The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (2019), and, as co-author, Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (2022).
