Introduction

Summary

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.