Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States
Jun 2020 · Oxford University Press
Ebook
352
Pages
Tools
info
family_home
Eligible
info
About this ebook
Speculative Fictions places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature. By studying Hamilton as an economic and imaginative writer, it argues that we can recast the conflict with the Jeffersonians as a literary debate about the best way to explain and describe modern capitalism, and explores how various other literary forms allow us to comprehend the complexities of a modern global economy in entirely new ways. Speculative Fictions identifies two overlooked literary genres of the late eighteenth-century as exemplary of this narrative mode. It asks that we read periodical essays and Black Atlantic captivity narratives with an eye not towards bourgeois subject formation, but as descriptive analyses of economic systems. In doing so, we discover how these two literary genres offer very different portraits of a global economy than that rendered by the novel, the imaginative genre we are most likely to associate with modern capitalism. Developing an aesthetic appreciation for the speculative, digressive, and unsystematic plotlines of these earlier narratives has the capacity to generate new imaginative projects with which to make sense of our increasingly difficult economic world.
Speculative Fictions places Alexander Hamilton at the center of American literary history to consider the important intersections between economics and literature. By studying Hamilton as an economic and imaginative writer, it argues that we can recast the conflict with the Jeffersonians as a lit...
Discover more
About the author
Elizabeth Hewitt is a professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, Columbus. She is the author of Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and editor of The Letters and Early Epistolary Writings of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.
Elizabeth Hewitt is a professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, Columbus. She is the author of Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and editor of The Letters and Early Epistolary Writings of Charles Brockden Brown and Edga...
Rate this ebook
Tell us what you think.
Reading information
Smartphones and tablets
Install the Google Play Books app for Android and iPad/iPhone. It syncs automatically with your account and allows you to read online or offline wherever you are.
Laptops and computers
You can listen to audiobooks purchased on Google Play using your computer's web browser.
eReaders and other devices
To read on e-ink devices like Kobo eReaders, you'll need to download a file and transfer it to your device. Follow the detailed Help Center instructions to transfer the files to supported eReaders.
