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Deficits and Desires - Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (Hardcover)
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Deficits and Desires - Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature (Hardcover)
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This book examines the effects on literary works of a little-noted
economic development in the early twentieth century: individuals
and governments alike began to regard going into debt as a normal
and even valuable part of life. The author also shows,
surprisingly, that the economic changes normalizing debt paralleled
and intersected with changes in sexual discourse.
In Victorian novels, sex and debt are considered dangerous
activities that the young should avoid in order to save and invest
toward eventual marriage and a home. In twentieth-century texts,
however, it often seems acceptable to go into debt and engage in
sex before marriage. These literary representations followed social
transformations as both economic and sexual discourse moved from
the logic of saving and production to the logic of circulation. In
Keynesian economics and consumerism, governments and individuals
were actually encouraged to borrow and to spend more in order to
increase demand and keep money circulating. In twentieth-century
sexual treatises, people were similarly encouraged to indulge their
desires, as pent-up states were considered as deleterious to the
physical body as they were to the economic.
In this book, the author traces these social transformations by
examining twentieth-century literary works and films that are
structured around contrasts between repressive and expansive forms
of economics and sexuality. He studies a range of authors,
including James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ezra
Pound, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frank Capra. The book ends with the
1960s, because after that decade deficits no longer seemed the cure
for anything, and the advocacy of sexual indulgence dwindled. For
half a century, however, the intersections of sexual and economic
discourses created a sense that society was on the verge of a vast
transformation. The artists studied in this book were fascinated by
such a prospect, but remained ambivalent, as it seemed that their
dreams of escaping dull bourgeois life and ending repression were
becoming true because of the influence of the crassest economic
policies.
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