| Financial topics and motifs saturate the plots, thematic structure and discourse of Victorian novels, yet the narrative treatment of finance proves problematic, generating formal fissures, generic and discursive dislocations, and eruptions of figurality. The body of criticism upon which I draw but from which I also depart correctly gauges the absorption of Victorian novels with questions of finance. It has directed our attention to how novels were embedded within a network of financial relations and has illuminated parallels between finance and fiction. Nonetheless, we need to account for the pressures the narrative treatment of financial topics placed upon nineteenth-century novels and explain the effects of these unexpected features upon readers. Doing so, we uncover the ways novels attenuated conflict over a hugely troubling subject for Victorian society and gain insight into what made finance so vexing. By repudiating speculation, Victorian society could split off an unacceptable from acceptable capitalism and divide the captain of industry from the stockjobber, socially sanctioned wealth from supposedly unearned, ill-gotten gains, and socially beneficial economic impulses from the unacceptable profit motive.;The introduction examines why financial institutions and practices involving financial speculation provoked ideological dilemmas for nineteenth-century bourgeois societies. In the four chapters and conclusion, I yoke aspects of finance and narrative form in order to understand their interaction. The conclusion considers the stubborn persistence of the conventions of Victorian financial novels while also imagining new possibilities for financial novels.;The novels that constitute the main object of my study include Little Dorrit (1857) and Our Mutual Friend (1865), by Charles Dickens; Hard Cash (1863), by Charles Reade; The Way We Live Now (1875), by Anthony Trollope; César Birotteau (1837) and the novella, La Maison Nucingen (1838) by Honoré de Balzac; and The Pit (1903), by Frank Norris. I take a comparative approach and look at novels written over a period of sixty years in order to situate and isolate the demands brought to bear upon the form of Victorian novels. |
