Money and American literature / edited by Paul Crosthwaite.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Crosthwaite, Paul, 1980- editor.

Series:

Cambridge themes in American literature and culture.

Cambridge themes in American literature and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Money in literature.

American literature--History and criticism.

American literature.

Economics in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xii, 405 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2025.

Summary:

Few topics are as central to the American literary imagination as money. American writers' preoccupations with money predate the foundation of the United States and persist to the present day. Writers have been among the sharpest critics and most enchanted observers of an American social world dominated by the 'cash nexus'; and they have reckoned with imaginative writing's own deep and ambivalent entanglements with the logics of inscription, circulation, and valuation that define the money economy itself. As a dominant measure of value, money has also profoundly shaped representations of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. American literature's engagements with money - and with directly related topics including debt, credit, finance, and the capitalist market - are among Americanists' most prominent concerns. This landmark volume synthesizes and builds upon the abundance of research in the field to provide the first comprehensive mapping of money's crucial role over five centuries of American literary history.

Contents:

Wealth and exchange in colonial American literature, 1516-1775 / Amanda Louise Johnson

The monetary cultures of the early nation / Elizabeth Hewitt

Antebellum sensationalism, or, melodramas of the market / David Anthony

Race, money, and the figure of the slave / Jeffory A. Clymer

Reckoning with money in the American renaissance / Andrew Lawson

Money and marriage in American literary realism / Henry B. Wonham

Naturalism's financial sublime / Jason Puskar

Morality, modernism, and the money question / Nicky Marsh

Loss and dispossession in American writing of the Great Depression / Melanie Benson Taylor

Keeping up and falling down in the suburbs / Martin Dines

Blackness and value from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black arts movement / Michael Germana

The counterculture and the culture of money / Joanna Freer

The logics and rhetorics of theft in 1970s feminist writing / Melanie Waters

Crisis money: fiction, finance, and belief in an age of shocks / Arne De Boever

Multiculturalism and the many meanings of money / Eva Bosenberg

Capitalism and racial form in three contemporary US poets / Christopher Chen

Imagining and occupying Wall Street / Christian P. Haines

Making ends meet in the gig economy: solidarity, cubicle nostalgia, and the contemporary novel at the end / Michelle Chihara

Native American literature and the persistence of the gift / Sean Teuton

Other worlds and other monies / Jo Lindsay Walton

Performing currency: money art in America / Emily Rosamond

Free money? Literature, liberty, and alternative currencies / Paul Crosth

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Jul 2025).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.

ISBN:

1-009-35044-7

1-009-35046-3

1-009-35048-X

OCLC:

1495415002