Speculative fictions : explaining the economy in the early United States / Elizabeth Hewitt.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hewitt, Elizabeth, 1965- author.

Contributor:

Maryann B. Sudo CW'63 and John B. Baxter, Jr., American History Fund.

Series:

Oxford studies in American literary history

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American literature--1783-1850--History and criticism.

American literature.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xii, 330 pages : illustration ; 24 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2020.

Summary:

Speculative Fictions' places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature. By studying Hamilton as an economic and imaginative writer, it argues that we can recast the conflict with the Jeffersonians as a literary debate about the best way to explain and describe modern capitalism, and explores how various other literary forms allow us to comprehend the complexities of a modern global economy in entirely new ways. 0'Speculative Fictions' identifies two overlooked literary genres of the late eighteenth-century as exemplary of this narrative mode. It asks that we read periodical essays and Black Atlantic captivity narratives with an eye not towards bourgeois subject formation, but as descriptive analyses of economic systems. In doing so, we discover how these two literary genres offer very different portraits of a global economy than that rendered by the novel, the imaginative genre we are most likely to associate with modern capitalism. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for the speculative, digressive, and unsystematic plotlines of these earlier narratives has the capacity to generate new imaginative projects with which to make sense of our increasingly difficult economic world.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: 1. Hamilton and the Complex Stories of Public Credit

David Hume's Plausible Fictions

Fictions in the Report on Public Credit

Organizing Commerce

Incredible Stories

Real Value, Real Bodies

Letter of the Law and the Bank of the United States

Encyclopedic Order

2. Jefferson and the Simple Story of Pastoral Economies

American Pastoral

Poetics of the Representative Anecdote

American Physiocracy

George Logan's Simple Truths

John Taylor of Caroline's Simple Vocabulary

Manufacturing the Simple System

3. Stories without Plots

Stores and Magazines

Weaving with Philip Freneau

Gleaning with Judith Sargent Murray

Scribbling with Charles Brockden Brown

4. The Slave as System

Calculating Worth

Plotting Objects

Narrating Slavery

Weaving with Ukawsaw Gronniosaw

Reckoning with Venture Smith

Mapping with Boyrereau Brinch

Conclusion: Explaining the Economy in the Twenty-First Century.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local Notes:

Acquired for the Penn Libraries with assistance from the Maryann B. Sudo CW'63 and John B. Baxter, Jr., American History Fund.

ISBN:

0198859139

9780198859130

OCLC:

1135665401

Publisher Number:

99985100938