When people speak about love and money, they usually are referring to a conflict: love distorted by the desire for money. Such statements imply that love has a distinct form before economics interferes, but this book aims to show that such a view simplifies what is going on, because people have always been deeply shaped by everything in the social order, including economics. So when people say that money is distorting love, what they are really saying is that the current relationship of love and economics is different from an earlier relationship. This book seeks then to demonstrate the intertwining of the discourses of love and money over a long history by focusing on moments when parallel conceptions appear in economic theories and love stories. The two discourses intersect because both seek to define qualities and behaviors of human beings which are most valuable and hence most desirable. Similar descriptions of valuable behaviors appear at roughly the same time in economic theories of how to acquire wealth and literary stories of how to find ideal lovers. By tracking mutual expressions of desire, value, and acquisition in economics and love stories, this book argues for the ubiquity of the intertwining of these discourses, while exploring shifts in conceptions of value. It focuses on four eras when economic and romantic conceptions of what is most desirable were actively changing in English discourses: the early modern 17th century, the Victorian 19th, the modernist 20th, and the postmodern present.

When people speak about love and money, they usually are referring to a conflict: love distorted by the desire for money. Such statements imply that love has a distinct form before economics interferes, but this book aims to show that such a view simplifies what is going on, because people have always been deeply shaped by everything in the social order, including economics. So when people say that money is distorting love, what they are really saying is that the current relationship of love and economics is different from an earlier relationship. This book seeks then to demonstrate the intertwining of the discourses of love and money over a long history by focusing on moments when parallel conceptions appear in economic theories and love stories. The two discourses intersect because both seek to define qualities and behaviors of human beings which are most valuable and hence most desirable. Similar descriptions of valuable behaviors appear at roughly the same time in economic theories of how to acquire wealth and literary stories of how to find ideal lovers. By tracking mutual expressions of desire, value, and acquisition in economics and love stories, this book argues for the ubiquity of the intertwining of these discourses, while exploring shifts in conceptions of value. It focuses on four eras when economic and romantic conceptions of what is most desirable were actively changing in English discourses: the early modern 17th century, the Victorian 19th, the modernist 20th, and the postmodern present.

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.

The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike. Movies seemed to speak directly to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed individual personality. Many political commentators believed that movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist mass politics-indeed, government control of the movie industry became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses-the crowd scenes-in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood, created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways of using the crowd.

The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike. Movies seemed to speak directly to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed individual personality. Many political commentators believed that movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist mass politics-indeed, government control of the movie industry became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses-the crowd scenes-in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood, created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways of using the crowd.