Fear and greed: financial crisis in the novel since 1850

Thesis

The financial crisis of 2008 has been the most significant global economic phenomenon of the new century. Sudden and largely unanticipated, this crisis nonetheless marks the latest in a series of financial panics that forms a welldocumented feature of finance capitalism stretching back to the Dutch Tulip Bubble of 1637 and beyond, including such notorious crises as the South Sea Bubble of 1720, the Railway Shares panics of 1837 and 1847, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and Black Monday in 1987. These and other crises have fostered a complex and diverse intellectual response - particularly since the South Sea Bubble - that has included interventions not only from economists and economic historians, but poets, dramatists, novelists, and others. This raises the question of whether the novel’s contribution to our wider understanding of financial crises has been fully acknowledged and assessed. In this thesis, the complex and shifting relationship between literary and non-literary responses to financial crisis is explored through an examination of the ideas of political economists, philosophers, journalists, financiers, and others, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Lord Overstone, Walter Bagehot, Herbert Spencer, Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, and J.M. Keynes, that situates their theories alongside readings of novels of financial crisis from the 1850s onward...

Abstract truncated for record page display

Authors: Hartley, C

• Publication date: 2015
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-eoq5aney8
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Literature and Economics; Norris; Financial Crisis; F. Scott Fitzgerald; H.G. Wells; Dickens; Dreiser; DeLillo; Novel; Bellow; Trollope; Amis
• Subjects: English Language and Literature