Genres of the Credit Economy : Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain

How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing moneyin other words, participating in the modern financial systemcome to seem like routine activities of everyday life? Genres of the Credit Economy addresses this question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. Chronicling the process by which some of our most important conceptual categories were naturalized, Mary Poovey explores complex relationships among forms of writing that are not usually viewed together, from bills of exchange and bank checks, to realist novels and Romantic poems, to economic theory and financial journalism. Taking up all early forms of financial and monetary writing, Poovey argues that these genres mediated for early modern Britons the operations of a market system organized around credit and debt. By arguing that genre is a critical tool for historical and theoretical analysis and an agent in the events that formed the modern world, Poovey offers a new way to appreciate the character of the credit economy and demonstrates the contribution historians and literary scholars can make to understanding its operations. Much more than an exploration of writing on and around money, Genres of the Credit Economy offers startling insights about the evolution of disciplines and the separation of factual and fictional genres.

How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money—in other words, participating in the modern financial system—come to seem like routine activities of everyday life? Genres of the Credit Economy addresses this question by examining the history of financial instruments and representations of finance in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.
Chronicling the process by which some of our most important conceptual categories were naturalized, Mary Poovey explores complex relationships among forms of writing that are not usually viewed together, from bills of exchange and bank checks, to realist novels and Romantic poems, to economic theory and financial journalism. Taking up all early forms of financial and monetary writing, Poovey argues that these genres mediated for early modern Britons the operations of a market system organized around credit and debt. By arguing that genre is a critical tool for historical and theoretical analysis and an agent in the events that formed the modern world, Poovey offers a new way to appreciate the character of the credit economy and demonstrates the contribution historians and literary scholars can make to understanding its operations.
Much more than an exploration of writing on and around money, Genres of the Credit Economy offers startling insights about the evolution of disciplines and the separation of factual and fictional genres.

Victorian Studies

"Mary Poovey is one of our most influential scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, and this is her most ambitious book. . . . [It is] full of historical detail and complex argument reflecting the major concerns of literary criticism of recent decades, and therefore will provoke criticism as well as praise."

— Regenia Gagnier

CONTENTS 8 Acknowledgments 10 Introduction 12 PREAMBLE: Mediating Genres 36 Imaginative Genres 39 Financial Writing 41 Monetary Genres 46 ONE: Mediating Value 68 Writing about Money in the New Credit Economy 72 The Fact/Fiction Continuum 88 TWO: Generic Differentiation and the Naturalization of Money 98 Inciting Belief through Print 104 Sir James Steuart’s Principles of Political Economy: Between Fiction and Theory 135 Money Talks: Thomas Bridges’s Adventures of a Bank-Note 155 INTERCHAPTER ONE: "The Paper Age" 164 The Takeoff in the Book Trade 167 The Proliferation of Bank Paper 172 Differential Forms 176 THREE: Politicizing Paper Money 182 The First Currency Radical: William Cobbett Pits Paper against Gold 185 Labor Notes and a Coinage of Pottery: Robert Owen and John Bray 207 FOUR: Professional Political Economy and Its Popularizers 230 Raising the Profile of Economic Theory: Ricardo, McCulloch, Chalmers, and John Stuart Mill 234 Financial Journalism: Economic Writing for Middle-Class Readers 254 W. Stanley Jevons and the Narrowing of Economic Science 286 FIVE: Delimiting Literature, Defining Literary Value 296 Literary Value and a Hierarchy of Imaginative Genres 298 Hierarchies of Reading 316 Facts, Fictions, and Literary Value 328 INTERCHAPTER TWO: Textual Interpretation and Historical Description 348 Reading Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy: Exemplary Interpretations 349 Historical Description 354 SIX: Literary Appropriations 364 Jane Austen’s Gestural Aesthetic 368 From Gesture to Formalism: Little Dorrit and Silas Marner 384 The Rewards of Form: The Last Chronicle of Barset 395 CODA 428 Notes 432 Bibliography 476 Index 496 Banking, Borrowing, Investing, And Even Losing Money - In Other Words, Participating In The Modern Financial System - Seem Like Routine Activities Of Everyday Life. This Book Looks At How This Came To Be The Case By Examining The History Of Financial Instruments And Representations Of Finance In 18th And 19th Century Britain. Mary Poovey. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.