Finance Fictions: Crises, Value, and Nationalism in American Literature

"Finance Fictions" examines pathbreaking works of American fiction and film from the late nineteenth century through the Great Depression that seek to define the historical, cultural, and economic significance of finance in American life. This historical period was marked by a series of major economic crises rooted in financial speculation, resulting in fierce debates not only about the merits of an increasingly financialized economy, but also about how such an economy reflected the cultural and historical trajectory of the United States. Through an examination of literary works by Edward Bellamy, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, and a film by Frank Capra, I argue that a genre of imaginative representation emerged in this period that directly questioned the relationship between U.S. cultural identity and the dynamics and ethics of a market economy and, in so doing, pioneered a range of formal and conceptual frameworks for depicting and explicating the highly abstract and increasingly sophisticated realm of finance that remains in place to this day.