Search

3 results

Chapter 4 - Reading Character in the Country and the City in Tess of the D’Urbervilles
from Part II - Finance Capital and the Economic and Cultural Turn toward London
Regina Martin, Denison University, Ohio
Book:

Modernism and Finance Capital

Published online:

12 December 2024

Print publication:

19 December 2024, pp 85-93
- Chapter
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Summary

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is motivated by questions surrounding the legibility of character, and it begins to associate those questions with the increasing economic and cultural influence of London. As an ostensibly provincial novel, Tess is an important test case for the claim that the financialization of the British economy was accompanied by a cultural turn toward London. This chapter argues that Tess is in fact a London novel as it depicts a provincial Wessex infused with the economic and spatial logic of London, a logic that poses problems for the reading of character in the novel, as it depicts Angel Clare mistakenly interpreting Tess’s character through a pastoral rather than urban hermeneutic.

British Literature, 1870–1940
Regina Martin
Published online:

12 December 2024

Print publication:

19 December 2024
- Book
- - Get access
    
    Buy a print copy
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
Modernism and Finance Capital interprets modernism as a historical moment of financial crisis. It expands the definition of finance capital beyond mode of capital accumulation and value form to include a complex of historical processes during the modernist period, which includes the growth of the professional classes, the rise of the modern corporation, the economic turn toward London, and the emergence of affect as economic and literary value form. The book thereby locates the origins of twenty-first century affective economy in the turn-of-the-twentieth century modernist and financial revolutions. Scholars working at the crossroads of economic and cultural studies will find a model for how to interpret literature and other cultural artifacts as participating in economic processes of finance capital even when they do not engage explicitly with such issues.

Edited by Paul Crosthwaite, Peter Knight, Nicky Marsh
Published online:

28 July 2022

Print publication:

11 August 2022
- Book
- - Get access
    
    Buy a print copy
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
In recent years, money, finance, and the economy have emerged as central topics in literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics explains the innovative critical methods that scholars have developed to explore the economic concerns of texts ranging from the medieval period to the present. Across seventeen chapters by field-leading experts, the book highlights how, throughout literary history, economic matters have intersected with crucial topics including race, gender, sexuality, nation, empire, and the environment. It also explores how researchers in other disciplines are turning to literature and literary theory for insights into economic questions. Combining thorough historical coverage with attention to emerging issues and approaches, this Companion will appeal to literary scholars and to historians and social scientists interested in the literary and cultural dimensions of economics.