Figures of Finance Capitalism

Writing, Class and Capital in Mid-Victorian Narratives

Borislav Knezevic

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN:
  9781138868632
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135947118
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Finance
• Index: Business

Figures of Finance Capitalism brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured, and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a patrician elite. This book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian middle-class social imagination by discussing a selection of major Victorian texts by Dickens, Gaskell, Thackeray and Macaulay. In so doing, it draws on several new perspectives on British history, as offered in the work of historians such as Tom Nairn, David Cannadine, and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. Articulating the basic coordinates for a new sociology of mid-Victorian literature, Borislav Knezevic views texts through the prism of the mid-Victorian literary field and its negotiations of the contemporary field of power.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Introduction The Novel, the Class System, and Finance Capital
• Chapter One A Historian in the Literary Marketplace: T.B. Macaulay, the English Constitution, and Finance Capitalism
• Chapter Two Gentility, Capitalism, and Mapping the Nation in Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford
• Chapter Three The Middle Class and the Novel in W.M. Thackeray's The Newcomes
• Chapter Four Banking on Sentiments: A Melodramatic Civil Society in Little Dorrit and A Tale of Two Cities
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited