Description
Book SynopsisSince the 1980s, scholars have made the case for examining nineteenth-century cultureparticularly literary outputthrough the lens of economics. In Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century: Abstracting Economics, two luminaries in the field of Victorian studies, Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp, have collected contributions from leading thinkers that push New Economic Criticism in new and exciting directions.
Spanning the Americas, India, England, and Scotland, this volume adopts an inclusive, global view of the cultural effects of economics and exchange. Contributors use the concept of abstraction to show how economic thought and concerns around money permeated all aspects of nineteenth-century culture, from the language of wills to arguments around the social purpose of art.
The characteristics of investment and speculation; the fraught symbolic and practical meanings of paper money to the Victorians; the shifting value of goods, services, and ideas; the evolving legal
Trade Review
“Highlighting the centrality of economic thought to nineteenth-century culture, this intriguing volume
expands our sense of what constituted the ‘economic.’ Its global reach and smart, wide-ranging essays make Culture and Money valuable reading.”
“Through original treatment of a wide range of topics, from art galleries to wills and from the textile industry to the representation of beggars,
Culture and Money in the Nineteenth Century showcases the impressive breadth and scope of economic thinking in the period.”
“These essays give some intriguing insights into … a fruitful, revealing and ever relevant field of interdisciplinary study.” * The Times Literary Supplement *
“This is an enormously useful book.…[It] offers us a valuable framework for thinking about the process of abstraction by which money and the economy became naturalized and universalized in the nineteenth century. And if its nature as an edited collection sometimes gives it a centrifugal feel, the historically-situated case studies that are the subject of the individual essays give us a sense of the nuances within which that process occurred. This is a book, in short, which poses more questions than it offers answers to, but that, I suspect, is very much what the editors wanted to achieve.” * Australasian Review of Victorian Studies *
Table of Contents* Acknowledgments * Introduction Abstracting Economics Daniel Bivona and Marlene Tromp * Part ONE: Broad Abstractions Character, Professional Expertise, and Nature * Chapter One: Born to the Business Heredity, Ability, and Commercial Character in Late Victorian Britain Aeron Hunt * Chapter Two: Shifting the Ground of Monetary Politics The Case of the 1870s Roy Kreitner * Chapter Three: The Comparative Advantages of Survival Darwin's Origin, Competition, and the Economy of Nature Daniel Bivona * Part TWO: Particular Abstractions Economics and Culture * Chapter Four: Art Unions and the Changing Face of Victorian Gambling Cordelia Smith * Chapter Five: El Metalico Lord Money and Mythmaking in Thomas Cochrane's 1859 Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru, and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination Jennifer Hayward * Chapter Six: From Cooperation to Concentration Socialism, Salvationism, and the "Indian Beggar" Suzanne Daly * Chapter Seven: Walter Scott's Two Nations and the State of the Textile Industry in Britain Kathryn Pratt Russell * Chapter Eight: Antidomestic The Afterlife of Wills and the Politics of Foreign Investment, 1850-85 Marlene Tromp * Contributors * Index
