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Downward Mobility - The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel (Paperback)
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Downward Mobility - The Form of Capital and the Sentimental Novel (Paperback)
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How do the stories we tell about money shape our economies?
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became
the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving
money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells the
tale of bankruptcy and financial failure, of people losing
everything and ending up in debtor's prison, of inheritances lost
and daughters left orphaned and poor. In Downward Mobility,
Katherine Binhammer argues that these stories of ruin are not
simple tales about the losers of capitalism but narratives that
help manage speculation of capital's inevitable collapse. Bringing
together contemporary critical finance studies with
eighteenth-century literary history, Binhammer demonstrates the
centrality of the myth of downward mobility to the cultural history
of capitalism-and to the emergence of the novel in Britain. Deftly
weaving economic history and formal analysis, Binhammer reveals how
capitalism requires the novel's complex techniques to render
infinite economic growth imaginable. She also explains why the
novel's signature formal developments owe their narrative dynamics
to the contradictions within capital's form. Combining new archival
research on the history of debt with original readings of
sentimental novels, including Frances Burney's Cecilia and Camilla,
Sarah Fielding's David Simple, and Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of
Wakefield, Downward Mobility registers the value of literary
narrative in interpreting the complex sequences behind financial
capitalism, especially the belief in infinite growth that has led
to current environmental crises. An audacious epilogue arms
humanists with the argument that, in order to save the planet from
unsustainable growth, we need to read more novels.
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