Writing and the Rise of Finance
Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century
Part of Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought
- Author: Colin Nicholson, University of Edinburgh
- Date Published: August 2004
- availability: Available
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521604482
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The early eighteenth century saw a far-reaching financial revolution in England. In this original study, Colin Nicholson reads familiar texts such as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera and The Dunciad as "capital satires," responding to the social and political effects of the installation of capitalist financial institutions in London. While they invested in stocks and shares, Swift, Pope and Gay conducted a campaign against the civic effects of new financial institutions such as the Bank of England and the inauguration of the National Debt. Conflict between these writers' inherited discourse of civic humanism and the transformations being undergone by their own society is shown to have had a profound effect on a number of key literary texts.
Read more- The first book-length investigation of the influence of the eighteenth-century financial revolution on contemporary literature
- Interdisciplinary - of interest to economic historians as well as literary scholars
- Ties in with current trendy focus on commodification, material culture, economic pressures on the production of literary texts
Reviews & endorsements
"...this most original study centers on the effects that the financial revolution in English society...had on some of the major writers of the period...The author's approach to these works from this specialized, political-economical point of view is consistent, resourceful, elucidating, and convincing; Nicolson...has presented a very valuable argument for viewing these 18th-century writers 'in terms of a developing political economy that was permanently changing their world as they wrote'...Highly recommended to those interested in 18th-century history and literature." R. G. Brown
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×Product details
- Date Published: August 2004
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9780521604482
- length: 240 pages
- dimensions: 229 x 150 x 17 mm
- weight: 0.362kg
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. A culture of commodities: 'Trivial Things' in The Rape of the Lock
2. Cultivating the bubble: some investing contemporaries
3. 'Some Very Bad Effects': The strange case of Gulliver's Travels
4. 'Bilk'd of Virtue': The Beggar's Opera
5. 'Abusing the City's Best Good Men': Pope's poetry of the 1730s
6. 'Illusion on the town': Figuring out credit in The Dunciad
Bibliography
Index.
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