Overview

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.

Full Product Details

Author:   Paul Crosthwaite (University of Edinburgh)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009350471

ISBN 10:   1009350471
Pages:   418
Publication Date:   17 July 2025
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
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Table of Contents

List of Figures; Contributors; Introduction Paul Crosthwaite; Part I. Origins: 1. Wealth and exchange in colonial American literature, 1516–1775 Amanda Louise Johnson; 2. The monetary cultures of the early nation Elizabeth Hewitt; Part II. Histories: 3. Antebellum sensationalism; or, Melodramas of the market David Anthony; 4. Race, money, and the figure of the slave Jeffory A. Clymer; 5. Reckoning with money in the American renaissance Andrew Lawson; 6. Money and marriage in American literary realism Henry B. Wonham; 7. Naturalism's financial sublime Jason Puskar; 8. Morality, modernism, and the money question Nicky Marsh; 9. Loss and dispossession in American writing of the great depression Melanie Benson Taylor; 10. Keeping up and falling down in the suburbs Martin Dines; 11. Blackness and value from the Harlem renaissance to the black arts movement Michael Germana; 12. The counterculture and the culture of money Joanna Freer; 13. The logics and Rhetorics of theft in 1970s feminist writing Melanie Waters; 14. Crisis money: fiction, finance, and belief in an age of shocks Arne De Boever; 15. Multiculturalism and the many meanings of money Eva Boesenberg; 16. Capitalism and racial form in three contemporary US poets Christopher Chen; 17. Imagining and occupying wall street Christian P. Haines; 18. Making ends meet in the gig economy: solidarity, cubicle nostalgia, and the contemporary novel at the end Michelle Chihara; Part III. Alternatives: 19. Native American literature and the persistence of the gift Sean Teuton; 20. Other worlds and other monies Jo Lindsay Walton; 21. Performing currency:mMoney art in America Emily Rosamond; 22. Free money? Literature, liberty, and alternative currencies Paul Crosthwaite; Index.

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Author Information

Paul Crosthwaite is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His books include Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis (2024), The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction (2019), and, as co-author, Invested: How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds (2022).

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