Description
Book SynopsisHow do the stories we tell about money shape our economies?Beginning in the late eighteenth century, as constant growth became the economic norm throughout Europe, fictional stories involving money were overwhelmingly about loss. Novel after novel tells the tale of bankruptcy and financial failure, of people losing everything and ending up in debtor's prison, of inheritances lost and daughters left orphaned and poor. In Downward Mobility, Katherine Binhammer argues that these stories of ruin are not simple tales about the losers of capitalism but narratives that help manage speculation of capital's inevitable collapse. Bringing together contemporary critical finance studies with eighteenth-century literary history, Binhammer demonstrates the centrality of the myth of downward mobility to the cultural history of capitalismand to the emergence of the novel in Britain. Deftly weaving economic history and formal analysis, Binhammer reveals how capitalism requires the novel's complex tech
Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Fictitious Capital and the Social History of Debt
2. Leveraging Fiction: When Debt Becomes Equity
3. Narrative Exchange: The Value of Stories-within-Stories
4. The Plot of Capital I: Cecilia and Risk Management
5. The Plot of Capital II: Camilla, Closure, and the Realization of Capital
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Index
