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1	Buying the story : transaction and narrative value in Balzac, Dostoevsky and Zola Paine, Jonathan January 2017 (has links) This thesis explores narrative as a self-reflexive commentary on the conditions of its own production. It argues that the need for narratives to perform economic functions, such as to provide an income for the author or to promote subscription to a host publication, affects how texts are written. It suggests that this approach is particularly suited to nineteenth-century prose fiction. It proposes a methodology for approaching this analysis based on treating the text as an exchange commodity in a transaction between author and reader whose economic function can be investigated and analysed. The thesis illustrates the application of this approach to major works of three nineteenth-century authors, following the evolution of the book format in France from its subordination to the roman-feuilleton in the late 1830s to its revival as an economically independent format in the 1880s, and contrasting this to the situation in contemporary Russia. A chapter on Balzac, which focusses on Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes, shows how this work can be seen as both a mirror of the rapidly evolving world of publishing during the 1830s and 1840s and as an extended discussion on the constituents of narrative value. It demonstrates how Balzac first adopts, then rejects and parodies, literary devices developed for the rapidly commercialising world of the roman-feuilleton. A chapter on Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, serialised in 1879-80, examines how an author could develop strategies to create literary and economic value within a contemporary readership which was far less developed than that in France. It demonstrates how important literary devices which Dostoevsky uses can be shown to have economic as well as aesthetic effect. The thesis concludes by an analysis of Zola's role in the industrialisation of narrative, which mirrors the rise of the story itself as a key tool of commercialisation. It illustrates this by a discussion of L'Argent (1891) as an allegory of the rise of the story as big business. The thesis promotes the relevance of economic criticism as an underrecognised critical discipline.
2	Face value : representations of money in American literature, 1896-1944 Key, Laura January 2012 (has links) This thesis analyses the significance of socio-historical conceptions of money in relation to the development of American literary modernism from 1896 to 1944. Taking as its starting point Jean-Joseph Goux's contention that there was a correlation between the end of gold-backed money in France and the birth of French modernist literature, this study considers how far this claim is tenable in the American case. In 1896, the key debate surrounding the presidential election was over whether money should be backed by gold or silver specie, which became a major public issue. Faith in the gold standard was challenged, raising the possibility that the source of monetary value was negotiable. Subsequent policy changes, financial panics, the Depression and the World Wars all affected public conceptions of money, until the Bretton Woods Agreement instituted an international gold standard supported by the gold-backed U.S. dollar in 1944, effectively re-establishing a firm relationship between gold and money. Since the 1990s, New Economic Criticism has sought to understand the ways in which money and literature converge throughout history. Although several studies of money and American literary realism have been undertaken, the relationship between money and American literary modernism specifically has largely been overlooked in scholarship. Analysing the works of Robert Herrick, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald and John Dos Passos, this thesis contends that a certain strand of American modernism developed as a series of reflections upon the relationship between money, value and realistic representation, in which the limitations of realism are exposed. Calling for a re-historicisation of the relationship between money and literature, this study argues that particular socio-historical moments in the story of American money emphasised the fluidity of money, sending social conceptions of value into flux in a society in which money functioned as the general equivalent by which all values were measured. These moments when accepted face values were called into question offered American writers the language and structure by which to consider and challenge the limitations of existing literary forms by comparing money with literature. Both paper money and literature, forms of representation which function via the inscription of words upon paper, contain an inherent duality; they have both a material value, in terms of their composition from paper and ink, and a deeper capacity to represent a certain value in the society in which they circulate. Modernism is concerned with such a duality, emphasising the materiality of the text and exposing the text's status as a representation that can never equal the reality that it represents. The authors discussed here confronted the discrepancy between written language as a reflection of the real world and words as material constructs in themselves through the metaphor of money, manifesting in both textual theme and structure, where the boundaries of realist representation are broken down via the use of unconventional forms. Utilising the method of close textual analysis and situating the texts examined within the wider socio-historical contexts of which they were born, the thesis focuses upon four different moments in the story of U.S. money and literature. This historically contingent approach facilitates the argument that these literary texts function as sites at which to examine and come to terms with contemporaneous social issues, helping to broaden both the purpose and structure of American literature in the early-twentieth century.
3	Towards a New Currency of Economic Criticism Douglas, Jason G. 09 July 2008 (has links) (PDF) “The Purloined Letter,” Edgar Allan Poe's third and final tale featuring the detective Dupin, has evoked a long history of critical response. Criticism has tended to read the text for its role in the development of detective fiction and as illustrative of various theoretical positions. However, the implications of the “The Purloined Letter,” as a tale of ratiocination, has largely been left unexplored. “The Purloined Letter” explores logical processes of value and exchange, particularly economic exchange, in a manner very similar to what Charles Sanders Peirce will call pragmatism several decades later. Dupin's deductive methods and Peirce's abductive logic express the nature of objects in terms of social systems of preference and perception rather metaphysics. Peirce's classification of signs as icon, index, or symbol provides a framework of signification which can be read in conjunction with “The Purloined Letter” to flesh out the role of materiality and value in the theory of economic criticism. Reading value and exchange as part of a social system of signs, perceptions, and representations of value will serve to expose a penchant for material fetishism in economic criticism and provide a theory of currency, value, and exchange that contextualizes representational and material notions of value within the social and economic system that provides the processes and mechanisms of value determination. The way that the Prefect, the Minister D___, and Dupin each conceptualize the purloined letter as having a different representational relationship with value can be used to demonstrate Poe's abductive framework for economy. Edgar Allan Poe Poe The Purloined Letter purloined letter commodity fethish fetishism currency commodity value representational value money C.S. Peirce Charles Sanders Peirce value theory currency theory gold currency paper currency signification monetary gold standard abductive logic abduction pragmatism pragmatic material value reward economic criticism economy economic theory modern economic theory metaphysics deduction detective MacGuffin Dupin The Purloined Poe economy of literature Seminar on the Purloined Letter the Purveyor of Truth exchange valuation preference perception social networks value logical process ratiocination semiotic English Language and Literature

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