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From personal finance and consumer spending to ballooning
national expenditures on warfare and social welfare, debt is
fundamental to the dynamics of global capitalism. The contributors
to this volume explore the concept of indebtedness in its various
senses and from a wide range of perspectives. They observe that
many views of ethics, citizenship, and governance are based on a
conception of debts owed by one individual to others; that artistic
and literary creativity involves the artist s dialogue with the
works of the past; and that the specter of catastrophic climate
change has underscored the debt those living in the present owe to
future generations."
The economic crisis of 2008 led to an unprecedented focus on the
world of high finance and revealed it to be far more arcane and
influential than most people could ever have imagined. Any hope of
avoiding future crises, it's clear, rest on understanding finance
itself. To understand finance, however, we have to learn its
history, and this book fills that need. Kevin R. Brine, an industry
veteran, and Mary Poovey, an acclaimed historian, show that finance
as we know it today emerged gradually in the late nineteenth
century and only coalesced after World War II, becoming ever more
complicated and ever more central to the American economy. The
authors explain the models, regulations, and institutions at the
heart of modern finance and uncover the complex and sometimes
surprising origins of its critical features, such as corporate
accounting standards, the Federal Reserve System, risk management
practices, and American Keynesian and New Classic monetary
economics. This book sees finance through its highs and lows, from
pre-Depression to post-Recession, exploring the myriad ways in
which the practices of finance and the realities of the economy
influenced one another through the years. A masterwork of
collaboration, Finance in America lays bare the theories and
practices that constitute finance, opening up the discussion of its
role and risks to a broad range of scholars and citizens.
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.
The chapters constituting this book are different in subject and
method, striking testimony to the range of Paulson's interests and
the versatility of his critical powers. In his prolific career he
has produced extensive analysis of art, poetry, fiction, and
aesthetics produced in England between 1650 and 1830. Paulson's
unique contribution has to do with his understanding of "seeing"
and "reading" as closely related enterprises, and "popular" forms
in art and literature as intimately connected-connections
illustrated by literary critics and art historians here. Every
essay shares some of the concerns and methods that characterize
Paulson's wonderfully idiosyncratic thought-except for the final
essay, an attempt systematically to analyze Paulson's critical
principles and methods. Recurrent themes are a concern with satire
in the eighteenth century; a connection between verbal and visual
reading; an insistence on the importance of individual artistic
choices to the history of culture; an attention to the aims and
motives of individual makers of art; and a sensitivity to the
crucial links between high and low art. This volume offers rich
explorations of a range of subjects: Swift's relationship to
Congreve; Zoffany's condemnation of Gillray and Hogarth, and
broader implications for the role of art in public discourse; the
presentation of mourning in the work of the Welsh artist and writer
Edward Pugh; G. M. Woodward's "Coffee-House Characters,"
representing a turn from satire on morals towards satire on
manners; Adam Smith's evolving aesthetic program; Samuel
Richardson's notions of social reading. The discussions represent a
variety of exemplifications of the Paulsonesque, showing a concern
with satiric representation in mixed media, with different forms of
heterodoxy and iconoclasm, and with the values of producers of
popular and polite culture in this period.
"A brilliant, original, and powerful book. . . . This is the most
skillful integration of feminism and Marxist literary criticism
that I know of." So writes critic Stephen Greenblatt about "The
Proper Lady and the Woman Writer," Mary Poovey's study of the
struggle of three prominent writers to accommodate the artist's
genius to the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideal
of the modest, self-effacing "proper lady." Interpreting novels,
letters, journals, and political tracts in the context of cultural
strictures, Poovey makes an important contribution to English
social and literary history and to feminist theory.
"The proper lady was a handy concept for a developing bourgeois
patriarchy, since it deprived women of worldly power, relegating
them to a sanctified domestic sphere that, in complex ways,
nourished and sustained the harsh 'real' world of men. With care
and subtle intelligence, Poovey examines this 'guardian and nemesis
of the female self' through the ways it is implicated in the style
and strategies of three very different writers."--Rachel M.
Brownstein, "The Nation"
""The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer" is a model of . . .
creative discovery, providing a well-researched, illuminating
history of women writers at the turn of the nineteenth century.
[Poovey] creates sociologically and psychologically persuasive
accounts of the writers: Wollstonecraft, who could never fully
transcend the ideology of propriety she attacked; Shelley, who
gradually assumed a mask of feminine propriety in her social and
literary styles; and Austen, who was neither as critical of
propriety as Wollstonecraft nor as accepting as Shelley ultimately
became."--Deborah Kaplan, "Novel
"
How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge?
How did description come to seem separable from theory in the
precursors of economics and the social sciences?
Mary Poovey explores these questions in "A History of the Modern
Fact," ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from
the publication of the first British manual on double-entry
bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in
the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge
from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government,
how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for
generating useful facts, and how belief--whether figured as credit,
credibility, or credulity--remained essential to the production of
knowledge.
Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern
social and economic knowledge possible, "A History of the Modern
Fact" provides important contributions to the history of political
thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary
and cultural criticism.
With much recent work in Victorian studies focused on gender and
class differences, the homogenizing features of 19th-century
culture have received relatively little attention. In "Making a
Social Body," Mary Poovey examines one of the conditions that made
the development of a mass culture in Victorian Britain possible:
the representation of the population as an aggregate--a social
body. Drawing on both literature and social reform texts, she
analyzes the organization of knowledge during this period and
explores its role in the emergence of the idea of the social body.
Poovey illuminates the ways literary genres, such as the novel, and
innovations in social thought, such as statistical thinking and
anatomical realism, helped separate social concerns from the
political and economic domains. She then discusses the influence of
the social body concept on Victorian ideas about the role of the
state, examining writings by James Phillips Kay, Thomas Chalmers,
and Edwin Chadwick on regulating the poor. Analyzing the conflict
between Kay's idea of the social body and Babbage's image of the
social machine, she considers the implications of both models for
the place of Victorian women. Poovey's provocative readings of
Disraeli's "Coningsby," Gaskell's "Mary Barton," and Dickens's "Our
Mutual Friend" show that the novel as a genre exposed the role
gender played in contemporary discussions of poverty and wealth.
"Making a Social Body" argues that gender, race, and class should
be considered in the context of broader concerns such as how social
authority is distributed, how institutions formalize knowledge, and
how truth is defined.
From personal finance and consumer spending to ballooning
national expenditures on warfare and social welfare, debt is
fundamental to the dynamics of global capitalism. The contributors
to this volume explore the concept of indebtedness in its various
senses and from a wide range of perspectives. They observe that
many views of ethics, citizenship, and governance are based on a
conception of debts owed by one individual to others; that artistic
and literary creativity involves the artist s dialogue with the
works of the past; and that the specter of catastrophic climate
change has underscored the debt those living in the present owe to
future generations."
Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a
standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven
Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an
analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that
the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural,
phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the
form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then
reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and
institutions--medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting
oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of
one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that
this instability helps explain why various institutional versions
of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn,
helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine
oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist
movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources--parliamentary
debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work,
middle-class periodicals on demesticity--Poovey examines various
controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which
representations of gender were simultaneously constructed,
deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of
chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional
status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the
nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the
feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the
isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the
isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.
How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge?
How did description come to seem separable from theory in the
precursors of economics and the social sciences?
Mary Poovey explores these questions in "A History of the Modern
Fact," ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from
the publication of the first British manual on double-entry
bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in
the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge
from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government,
how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for
generating useful facts, and how belief--whether figured as credit,
credibility, or credulity--remained essential to the production of
knowledge.
Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern
social and economic knowledge possible, "A History of the Modern
Fact" provides important contributions to the history of political
thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary
and cultural criticism.
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.
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