Panic! : markets, crises, & crowds in American fiction / David A. Zimmerman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zimmerman, David A. (David Andrew), 1964-

Series:

Cultural studies of the United States

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

American fiction.

Financial crises in literature.

American fiction--20th century--History and criticism.

Depressions in literature.

Popular culture--United States--History.

Popular culture.

Financial crises.

History.

Literature and society.

United States.

Literature and society--United States--History.

Financial crises--United States--History.

Physical Description:

xii, 294 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2006]

Summary:

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers of the period published scores of novels that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In Panic!, David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined-and, in one case, incited-market crashes and financial panics.

Panic! examines how Americans' attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, corporations, and history. Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand not only how financial markets worked, but also how mass acts of financial reading, including novel reading, could trigger economic disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how, by concentrating on markets in crisis, novelists were able to explore the limits of fiction's aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.

Contents:

Panic and the pétroleuse

I can do anything with words : Thomas Lawson's frenzied fictions

Frank Norris and the mesmeric sublime

Melodrama and the moral implications of financial panic

The financier and the ends of accounting.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 229-288) and index.

ISBN:

0807830232

0807856878

OCLC:

62533810

Publisher Number:

9780807830239

9780807856871

Online:

Publisher description