Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-hc48f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T03:33:04.842Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Learning finance through fiction: ‘Cecilia’ and the perils of credit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Joyce Goggin
Joyce Goggin*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author: Joyce Goggin, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 19268, 1000 GG Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email: j.goggin@uva.nl
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

This article discusses the rise of modern banking, the invention of credit and a related persistent orientation to the future inherent in credit-based economies, through the example of the novel which, as a literary form, came into being at roughly the same time. As a distinctly commercial genre and as a product of the financial revolution, novels ask readers to ‘credit’ the stories they tell with truthfulness, and to invest them with a particular form of credibility as significant narratives. At the same time, novels invite readers to imagine ‘as if’ scenarios and possible worlds in much the same way that borrowed capital enables people to construct life worlds based on resources not yet realised through investment in a speculative economy. Therefore, by examining how finance and gambling debts circulate in one particular text from the eighteenth century - Francis Burney's Cecilia - as a primary example of how credit and fictionalisation grew up together, this article argues that credit and risk feed into the narrative accounting and recounting of the text and articulate the affective structure of the financialised future that we have now inherited, and which informs how we understand ourselves as subjects, as well as how we interact with finance as a form of entertainment.

Keywords

Financefictiongamblingspeculationsubjectivityentertainment
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1: Hard cash , 2015 , pp. 61 - 74
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2015 The Author(s)

References

References

Aristotle (1992) Politics. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Balen, M. (2002) The King, the Crook, and the Gambler: The True Story of the South Sea Bubble and the Greatest Financial Scandal in History. London: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Benn-Michaels, W. (1987) The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Braudel, F. (1982) The Wheels of Commerce, Civilization and Capitalism. Volume II. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Burgess, M.J. (2008) Courting Ruin: The Economic Romances of Frances Burney. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, 28(2): 131–53.Google Scholar
Burke, E. (1759) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London.Google Scholar
Burney, F. (2008/1796) Cecilia: Or, Memoirs of an Heiress. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Clark, G. (2002) Embracing Fatality through Life Insurance. In: Baker, T. and Jonathan Simon, J. (eds.) Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 80–97.Google Scholar
Codr, D. (2005) A Store Yet Untouched: Speculative Ideology in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. Unpublished dissertation. Cornell University, USA.Google Scholar
Conlin, J. (2013) Introduction. In: The Pleasure Garden, from Vauxhall to Coney Island. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1–29.Google Scholar
Datson, L. (1998) Classical Probability in the Enlightenment. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
de Bolla, P. (1981) The Discourse of the Sublime. London: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Defoe, D. (1720) The Chimera: Or, The French Way of Paying National Debts, Laid Open, Betting an Impartial Account of the Proceedings in France, for Raising a Paper Credit and Settling the Mississippi Stock. London: T. Warner.Google Scholar
Defoe, D. (1965) Robinson Crusoe. Middlesex: Penguin.Google Scholar
de Goede, M. (2005) Virtue, Fortune, and Faith: A Genealogy of Finance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Eagleton, T. (2005) The English Novel: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Epstein, S.A. (2009) An Economic and Social History of Later Medieval Europe, 1000-1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Finel-Honigman, I. (2010) A Cultural History of Finance. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fisher, W. (1999) Queer Money. English Literary History, 66(1): 1–23.Google Scholar
Goggin, J. (2013) Bad Economics: Hard Cash, Soft Culture. Tamara: Journal for Critical Organization Theory, 11(2): 11–25.Google Scholar
Goggin, J. (2010) Hogarth's Legacy and the Comics’ Progress. In: Goggin, J. and Hassler-Forest, D. (eds.) The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Genre. Jefferson: McFarland, 5–25.Google Scholar
Kant, I. (1987/1790) Critique of Judgment. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.Google Scholar
Kavanagh, T. (1993) Enlightenment and the Shadows of Chance: The Novel and the Culture of Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Kowaleski-Wallace, E. (1997) Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 52–69.Google Scholar
Lopez, R.S. and Raymond, I.W. (eds. and trans). (2001) Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World: Illustrative Documents. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lynch, D.S. (1998) The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Meier, T.K. (1987) Defoe and the Defense of Commerce. English Literary Studies Monograph Series, 38. University of Victoria, Canada.Google Scholar
Ong, W.J. (2002) Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Petram, L. (2010) The World's First Stock Exchange: How the Amsterdam Market for Dutch East India Company Shares became a Modern Securities Market, 1602-1700. Unpublished Dissertation. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Netherlands.Google Scholar
Poovey, M. (2008) Genres of Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Sherman, S. (1996) Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth Century: Accounting for Defoe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Smith, A. (1991/1776) The Wealth of Nations. New York: Prometheus Books.Google Scholar
Taylor, M.C. (2004) Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World without Redemption. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Watt, I. (2000) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Richardson, Fielding, Defoe. London: Pimlico.Google Scholar
Weyler, K.A. (1996) ‘A Speculating Spirit’: Trade, Speculation, and Gambling in Early American Fiction. Early American Literature, 31(3): 207–42.Google Scholar

Films cited

Boiler Room (2000) Dir. Ben Younger, New Line Cinema.Google Scholar
Margin Call (2011) Dir. J.C. Chandor, Myriad Pictures.Google Scholar
Rogue Trader (1999) Dir. James Dearden, Granada Film Productions.Google Scholar
Wall Street (1987) Dir. Oliver Stone, Twentieth Century Fox.Google Scholar
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (2010) Dir. Oliver Stone, Twentieth Century Fox.Google Scholar
The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) Dir. Martin Scorsese, Paramount/Universal Pictures.Google Scholar