1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910812864803321

Autore

Poovey Mary

Titolo

Genres of the credit economy : mediating value in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain / / Mary Poovey

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Chicago, : University of Chicago Press, 2008

ISBN

9786611966232

1-281-96623-1

0-226-67521-1

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (523 p.)

Disciplina

332.0941/09033

Soggetti

Finance - Great Britain - History

Consumer credit - Great Britain - History

Money in literature

Money - Social aspects - Great Britain

Economics and literature - Great Britain - History

Literary form - History

English literature - History and criticism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- PREAMBLE. Mediating Genres -- CHAPTER ONE. Mediating Value -- CHAPTER TWO. Generic Differentiation and the Naturalization of Money -- INTERCHAPTER ONE. "The Paper Age" -- CHAPTER THREE. Politicizing Paper Money -- CHAPTER FOUR. Professional Political Economy and Its Popularizers -- CHAPTER FIVE. Delimiting Literature,Defining Literary Value -- INTERCHAPTER. TWO Textual Interpretation and Historical Description -- CHAPTER SIX. Literary Appropriations -- CODA -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

Sommario/riassunto

How did banking, borrowing, investing, and even losing money-in other words, participating in the modern financial system-come to seem likeroutine activities of everydaylife? Genres of the Credit Economy addressesthis 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 monetarywriting, 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.