01-24 Introduction

INDRODUCTION


This book grows out of two questions I could not answer after writing A History of the Modem Fact: If the kind of knowledge that contemporary society values is really the modem fact, then why does the discipline of Literary studies matter? What can Literary scholars do?1

I don't know whether I've really answered the first of these questions, for, as the last sections of this book reveal, I continue to worry about the implications of many developments within Literary studies, especially as the discipline is now practiced in U.S. graduate programs. My suggestion about what Literary scholars can do is spelled out most explicitly in the last interchapter and demonstrated in chapter 6； but the entirety of Genres of the Credit Economy is intended to address the issues behind this question. For it has proved impossible for me to see what we might do until I have a better understanding of how this discipline became what it now is. I have tried to write the history of my discipline by understanding it as a particular genre. As a genre, Literary studies was developed to describe and explain another set of genres (Literary writing) as part of a more general process of generic differentiation, the gradual elaboration of sets of conventions and claims about method that were intended to differentiate between kinds of writing. This process of generic differentiation, in turn, belongs to the general history of specialization that we call modernization.2

Seeing Literary studies in this way is to ask about thefunction of the discipline, and, by extension, it has required me to think about the functions that Literary writing played during the last two centuries, as the process of specialization has accelerated. I have come to understand this function in terms of value: at the end of the seventeenth century, one of the functions performed by imaginative writing in general was to mediate value—that is, to help people understand the new credit economy and the market model of value that it promoted.

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value that it promoted. As a subset of imaginative writing, Literary writing was delimited at the end of the eighteenth century, in an attempt to identify a special function that could be performed by some kinds of imaginative writing and not others.3 By associating it with a special kind of value—one not defined by the market—writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to free Literary writing from the function that imaginative writing had performed for most of the eighteenth century and, thus, to deny that other kind of value that Literary writing continued to have, as a commodity priced by market forces.

The changing function of imaginative writing, which was both reflected in and facilitated by the delimitation of Literature, can best be understood alongside two other sets of genres that also mediated value at the end of the seventeenth century. These two other sets are, on the one hand, monetary genres—gold and silver coins, paper money, and forms of credit paper— and, on the other, various types of writing about the market, credit, and price—shipping lists, prices current, economic theory, and so on. In the beginning of the period I examine here—the late seventeenth century and the first three-quarters of the eighteenth—these three genres were not consistently differentiated from each other. Not only did they perform variants of a single function, but they sometimes shared formal features as well. A shipping list was identical in format to the lists that appeared in poetic blazons or satiric catalogs, for example, and the promissory note used to acknowledge a debt contained phrases that also appeared in some imaginative texts. Because these genres—or the continuum of writing from which they would eventually be differentiated as genres—mediated the credit economy, all this writing helped make the system of credit and debt usable and the market model of value familiar as well. While the process of generic differentiation that this book describes was already under way in the eighteenth century, it was not until Literature was declared to be a different kind of imaginative writing that a secular model of value completely at odds with the market model was articulated. When this occurred, Literary writing gave up its claim to be valuable in the old sense, precisely by insisting that it was more valuable in another, more novel sense.

Even if champions of Literary writing repeatedly proclaimed the superiority of the value it was said to produce, by the middle decades of the nineteenth century this claim was widely disputed—or simply ignored—as other kinds of writing, including economic writing, acquired greater prestige. This prestige was partly a function of the kind of knowledge these non-Literary genres were said to produce—facts and information instead of fictions and imaginative truths—but, partly, it was a function of the social conditions that supported these claims about knowledge.


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that supported these claims about knowledge. As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, economic writers as a group were able to achieve a greater degree of what a modern sociologist would call professional organization than imaginative writers were. As we will also see, they were able to do so partly because the individuals who wrote economic and financial commentary distributed their efforts across the kinds of economic writing, without the rancorous feuds and fierce competition that so divided the ranks of imaginative writers.

In order to raise the prestige of fact-based genres like economic writing relative to the genres that circulated only fictions, of course, writers had to establish and maintain a strict distinction between fact and fiction.4 In the first two chapters of Genres of the Credit Economy, I show how this distinction was introduced, as part of the breakup of the continuum of writing that mediated value at the turn into the eighteenth century. While the distinction between fact and fiction was crucial to generic differentiation and to the social status that various genres eventually attained, however, it proved virtually impossible both to distinguish absolutely between the two and to align fact and fiction perfectly with genres that were consistently distinguishable from each other. By the middle decades of the nineteenth century； as we will see in chapter 4, efforts to purge the fact-based genres of every element of fiction were visibly strained; and, as we will see in chapter 5, in the 1860s, some Literary writers tried to ban facts from novels in a desperate attempt to raise the status of this form. The impossibility of distinguishing absolutely between fact and fiction and the proliferation of publications that were neither completely factual nor totally fictitious continued to frustrate writers7 efforts to use generic differentiation as a reliable instrument for enhancing social prestige.

Even a reader willing both to entertain the notion that generic differentiation is a social process, with implications for status, and to see economic and Literary writing as two outcomes of the distinction between fact and fiction might wonder what money is doing in this history. On the face of things, money does not seem to have anything to do with genre, and the distinction between fact and fiction simply seems irrelevant to the function or use of money. In my account of generic differentiation, however, money plays a crucial role, for reasons that are both theoretical and historical. For the very fact that we no longer notice that money consists of various kinds or that its function depends on writing means that money has been naturalized: through the social process that I describe in this book, money has become so familiar that its writing has seemed to disappear and it has seemed to lose its history as (various forms of) writing.5 In being taken for granted,



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taken for granted, the writing that makes money serve its primary social function has passed beneath the horizon of cultural visibility. As a result of naturalization, money has come to seem simply like an instrument instead of something that was made to be used, in some ways and not others, as part of institutional practices that naturalization also tends to mask.

To the extent that we no longer see money as writing, then, and to the extent that we no longer realize that its various kinds function slightly differently (a banknote transfers value immediately; a credit card defers this transfer), we are experiencing the outcome of naturalization. As we will see in the preamble and chapter 1, various monetary genres were more or less susceptible to naturalization, but, in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, money, as a general kind, was so effectively naturalized that the various genres it took came to seem incidental. We will also see, in chapter 6, that, in moments of fiscal crisis, the differences between monetary genres could become visible again, both as a sign that something had gone wrong in the credit economy and, when suitably interpreted, as a means of assuring worried Britons that the very instability of one kind of money could mean that other kinds were sound. Thus, the distinctions among kinds of money, which the process of naturalization tended to efface, could always be restored to visibility, always be made to matter, as a means of reinforcing the naturalization of the kind.

Economic and Literary genres did not undergo naturalization in exactly this way, for neither set of genres has completely lost its visibility as writing. The former, as explanations or accounts of the credit economy, came to seem most credible when its writing appeared to be transparent—is, when texts seemed simply to describe or refer to economic and financial matters rather than calling attention to themselves as writing or books. The latter, by contrast, increasingly succeeded precisely to the degree to which its writing was not transparent and, sometimes, primarily because of its material embodiment in a beautiful or rare book.6 Instead of making their status as writing disappear, as in the case of monetary genres, naturalization has erased the historical relationship between these two sets of genres; it has effaced the common function that once linked them and the historical process by which they were differentiated and ranked. In the process of becoming disciplines, of course, and partly because of the naturalization of money, economic and Literary genres have also lost their original affinity with monetary genres, which also mediated value in an earlier time.

Money plays another critical role in this history. For money—whether paper or coin—constitutes one of the earliest, and most important, forms of representation in relation to which it seemed crucial to make and reinforce a distinction between fact and fiction.

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force a distinction between fact and fiction.7 The version of this distinction that was articulated in relation to money was the distinction between valid and invalid monetary instruments. As we will see, the difficulties of making and defending this distinction were matters of concern even when coins constituted England's primary form of money; but the introduction of paper credit—first in the form of goldsmiths' receipts and bills of exchange, then in the bewildering varieties of credit paper that proliferated in the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth—considerably complicated efforts to distinguish between valid and invalid monetary forms. The challenges associated with maintaining this distinction in relation to monetary instruments foreshadowed similar problems that appeared in efforts to distinguish dearly and absolutely between fact and fiction and between the other generic kinds that also mediated value in this period, writing about financial and monetary matters and imaginative writing.

Economic, imaginative, and monetary genres were not the only kinds of writing that mediated value at the turn into the eighteenth century, of course, nor were these the only genres in which the distinction between fact and fiction came to matter. I also realize that economic writing and Literary writing acquired their modern, disciplinary forms through a process of differentiation that involved genres I do not discus in this book. What is arguably the most important seventeenth-century generic innovation, natural philosophy, also bore a complex relationship to value and the credit economy; and history, philology, and the classics, on the one hand, and physics, mechanics, and mathematics, on the other, undeniably influenced the delimitation of Literary studies and economics, respectively. While a more complete account of generic differentiation would include these (and other) disciplines, I have chosen not to do so. Partly, this expresses the limitations of my own knowledge, but, partly, it articulates a conviction that many contemporary scholars share—that economics and Literary studies have some special relationship to each other.

Before I describe the terms in which scholars have tried to understand this relationship, let me explain explicitly why I think these two disciplines should be studied together. What economic writing and Literary writing share, both historically and theoretically, is an engagement with the problematic of representation. This phrase—the problematic of representation-— be familiar to Literary critics, for it has become one way scholars describe the gap that separates the sign from its referent or ground (of value or meaning), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution, approximation, or obscurity. Unlike most Literary* critics, however, I do not present the problematic of representation as a property of all systems of representation.


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Instead, I argue that representation becomes problematic—it presents problems that are both social and epistemological—only at certain times and under conditions that are historically and socially specific. A system of representation is experienced as problematic only when it ceases to work— that is, when something in the social context calls attention to the deferral or obfuscation of its authenticating ground. Thus, for example, when in 1720 the South Sea Bubble suddenly swelled up, then just as dramatically collapsed, the ground of its shares' value first seemed magical, then nonexistent, and English men and women were left wringing their collective hands over the fictions inherent in the modern credit economy. By the same token, when in 1797 the Bank of England suspended its promise to redeem its paper notes with gold, the authenticating ground of paper credit seemed suddenly to disappear, and the nation's welfare seemed to be imperiled by a fiction whose effects had been contained for most of the eighteenth century.

When the problematic of representation becomes visible—as it did in the episodes just described—this can have grave implications for a society's economic and political stability, for it can jeopardize the prevailing model of value, the conventions that facilitate trust, and the signs that convey creditworthiness—monetary, social, legal, and political. The kinds of writing that eventually became economic and financial writing, on the one hand, and imaginative-then Literary—writing, on the other, were intimately involved in managing these troubling effects. This is why examining these genres together, and in relation to one another, is so revealing, for the different strategies by which each set of genres managed the problematic of representation helped give the modern disciplines their distinctive forms.

In the genres associated with economic writing, writers elaborated the category of fact by analogy to a distinction that natural philosophical writers had been making for decades, as a way to make market transactions seem as regular and harmonious as nature. Economic writers also helped neutralize the suspicion, often voiced by seventeenth-century writers, that financial matters were cloaked in secrecy by insisting that the very opacity of market transactions required someone to explain the secrets that made the market so difficult to understand; this figure, the economic expert, is the ancestor of the nineteenth-century economic theorist and of the modern economist as well. Imaginative writers, meanwhile, elaborated the category of fiction as a particular kind of relation between representation and the real world. Fiction helped manage the problematic of representation by creating a non-factual form of representation that was nevertheless not a lie. All the genres of fiction, in other words, became safe forms in which writers could explore the troubling and exciting possibility that representation could always float free of its ground.


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the troubling and exciting possibility that representation could always float free of its ground.

Like economic and imaginative genres, money also constituted a form of writing in relation to which the problematic of representation became visible—especially in periods in which the nation's money supply was imperiled or speculative manias gripped the nation. Like economic and imaginative writing again, monetary genres could also be used to manage this problematic, as when the 1844 Bank Act fixed the relation between gold and the Bank of England's paper or when, in 1866, businesses' refusal to accept checks was interpreted as a sign that the Bank's paper was sound. In the beginning of the period I examine here, however, the most revealing relationship between monetary genres and the problematic of representation involved the difficulty that government officials faced in policing the distinction between valid and invalid money. As a prototype for the distinction between fact and fiction, the distinction between valid and invalid money was critical to all the strategies for managing this problematic; but, as a distinction that was nearly impossible to maintain, it was a constant reminder of the impermanence and inadequacy of every attempt to fix such distinctions.

By restoring monetary instruments, writing about economics and finance, and imaginative writing to the generic continuum that once linked them, I initially want to highlight the mediating function that these kinds of writing shared, the ways the problematic of representation appeared within them, and the ways various modes of writing managed this problematic. The majority of this book, however, is devoted to the story of the separation of these generic kinds. During the course of the eighteenth century, practitioners of both writing about financial matters and imaginative writing began to renounce their shared function—to deny that they shared the same function or practiced it in the same way. (They even more emphatically rejected their affiliation to the kind of writing that functioned as money.) By the 1740s, this denial began to take the form of generic distinctions (novels as opposed to financial commentary, political economic systems as opposed to romances), which were increasingly equated with—or used to define—the distinction between fact and fiction. Left suspended by these disavowals were specific words_like credit and value—that retained a place in the lexicons of both sets of genres and that remained as switchpoints or sites of overlap between them, even as these concepts became central to the function of various kinds of money.

Participants on both sides of what increasingly became a naturalized generic divide contributed to this separation. On the one side, eighteenth-



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Participants on both sides of what increasingly became a naturalized generic divide contributed to this separation. On the one side, eighteenth century economic writers sought to emulate natural philosophical conventions for generating facts by producing political economic systems that first marginalized, then specifically repudiated any features associated with fiction. By the nineteenth century, the large field of economic writing had itself been informally subdivided into ranked kinds, a subdivision that included, at its higher rungs, tomes of increasingly mathematical economic theory and, at its lower, newspaper articles and periodical essays that helped familiarize readers with the operations of financial institutions. On the other side, eighteenth-century imaginative writers increasingly denied that their work had any meaningful connection to matters economic or financial— even (or especially) the connection that all forms of print so obviously continued to have to the market. As the volume of printed materials increased after 1770, and increased again in the wake of the mid-nineteenth-century repeal of the taxes on knowledge, imaginative writers struggled to enforce their own version of an internal hierarchy. As we will see in chapters 4 and 5, this hierarchy differed from its counterpart in economic writing in being characterized not by an informally agreed-on division of labor but by acrimonious accusations and internal policing, intended to distinguish between "refined" or "polite" variants of Literature and the lesser realm of "trash" or "print commerce."8 As we will see in the first interchapter and in chapters 3 and 5, efforts to discriminate between the two kinds of writing (economic and Literary) intensified in the decades surrounding the turn into the nineteenth century, as the increase in the overall output of the publishing industry threatened to politicize all kinds of print—including paper money. I discuss the outcomes of these intensified efforts in chapters 4 and 5: a mode of economic writing that derived its descriptive and narrative conventions, and, increasingly, its method, from the physical sciences and mathematics and a mode of Literary writing that accommodated a variety of generic conventions but discriminated between itself and mere pretenders in terms of a set of values supposedly unique to Literature (originality, an elevated style, a form of textual autonomy that emulated an organism, and a distinctly critical relation to the credit economy).

During the middle decades of the nineteenth century, for reasons I explain in chapter 4, the monetary genres acquired the taken-for-grantedness that I have associated with naturalization. As the writing that enabled money to work became less visible, the monetary genres played an increasingly marginal role in the relationship between the two other genres with which I am concerned. After chapter 4, then—and apart from a critical reappearance in chapter 6—money virtually disappears from my narrative, which focuses increasingly on the version of naturalization that produced the modern disciplines of economics and Literary studies.


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modern disciplines of economics and Literary studies. During most of the century, economic and Literary writers both continued to stress the generic differences between them by differentiating between the modes of knowledge they claimed to produce. Even as political economists and Literary writers elaborated and reinforced this distinction, however, the two genres continued to have a complex relationship to each other. Most obviously, as we will see in chapter 4, writers on the economic side of the divide borrowed tropes and narrative conventions from imaginative writers when they encountered economic phenomena that defied the discipline's ordinary explanatory paradigms. On the other side, nineteenth-century Literary writers repeatedly—and, after 1845, increasingly—appropriated economic and financial themes and real-life situations for fictional treatment. As we will see in chapter 6, most of these Literary appropriations were only incidentally concerned with the explanatory function that was central to writing about money and finance; imaginative writers' tendency to mine contemporary financial events for characters and plots paradoxically cultivated in readers a tolerance for ignorance about the very financial mechanisms political economists sought to explain, and this strange symbiosis both underscored the differences between the two kinds of writing and bound them together in an increasingly complicated, increasingly misrecognized relationship of mutual indebtedness, masked by mutual disavowal and misunderstanding.

In the three penultimate sections of this book—the second interchapter and chapters 5 and 6—1 turn to Literature and Literary criticism. While I devote two chapters to economic writing and two to its Literary counterpart, however, the latter contain a perspective that I have not been able to indude in the former. In my discussions of Literary writing, I have been able to show how the disciplinary categories we now use—as a result of the refinement of Literary studies in university classrooms—grew out of and now influence the way we see these nineteenth-century Literary texts. In the best of all possible worlds, I would have been able to provide a similar discussion of the relationship between the modem discipline of economics and the way we see nineteenth-century political economic texts. I have not been able to provide this perspective partly because I am not trained in modern economics and partly because so many modem economists repudiate the theories and methods practiced by their disciplinary predecessors. If they do not explicitly deny that the discipline of economics has a history, they deny that its history matters. As a consequence, there seems to be a greater divide—or at least one that is difficult for an outsider to cross—between the protocols of the modem discipline and the protocols developed in the nineteenth century.


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nineteenth century. I can only hope that some day an economic historian will write a version of this history from the other side so that Literary scholars like myself can see how this discipline's present informs the way we understand its past.
Many scholarly works populate the fields that overlap with or lie adjacent to the territory I cover here, and I want both to acknowledge these and to distinguish my work from them. In their introduction to the volume entitled The New Economic Criticism, Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen offer a useful overview of what, by the late 1990s, had already become a flourishing scholarly field. Surveying both Literary appropriations of economic themes and economists' use of Literary concerns, Woodmansee and Osteen identify four general areas of exciting work. These include studies of Literary production, often the economic conditions in which a given writer worked;9 formalist studies of the internal "economies" of a text or of money or language as an ''economy/' which Woodmansee and Osteen call studies of "internal circulation"; studies that focus on the market forces that affect canonization and "economies of reading"; and a group of "meta-theoretical" works that focus on the "practices, presumptions and protocols of economic criticism itself/'10 While this typology constitutes an interesting attempt to capture an emergent subfield of scholarly work, in the years since its publication the schema has been swamped by a veritable flood of new scholarship. While I cannot provide the kind of comprehensive typological system that Woodmansee and Osteen devised, I do want to offer a provisional grouping for some of these works in order to make my debts clear and to highlight the nature of my own contribution.

The territory is easier to map on the economics side of the disciplinary divide, for, as I have just stated, most modern economists are indifferent to the history of their discipline and relatively uninterested in the foundational metaphors that govern economic writing. The most telling contributions to this field have been made by Deirdre McCloskey, but, in addition to McCloskey, Philip Mirowski, Arjo Klamer, Thomas C. Leonard, and Robert M. Solow have also called attention to the relationship between language, generic features, and the production of economic knowledge.11 In writing Genres of the Credit Economy, however, I have been less influenced by this work than by a group of economic histories, many of them quite old, that chronicle the development of specific financial institutions, practices, and instruments. Most important are histories by A. E. Feavearyear, L. S. Press-nell, David Kynaston, Ranald C. Michie, and George Robb.12 Histories of


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Histories of the development of economics as a discipline or school of "thought" have also been extremely helpful, although, as I argue in a moment, thought is a category to which I want to add generic and disciplinary ballast. The histories of this kind I have regularly consulted include Joseph A. Schumpeter's influential A History of Economic Analysisf William Letwin's The Origins of Scientific Economics, Richard Olson's Science Deified and Science Defied, Deborah A. Redman's The Rise of Political Economy as a Science, and Margaret Schabas's The Natural Origins of Economics,

The scholarship on the Literary side of my subject is more extensive, and, although much of it could still be assigned to the categories thatWoodman-see and Olson identified in 1999,1 use a different set of groupings to highlight the theoretical and methodological differences among these works. The three large categories that I identify in this scholarship—all of which I have drawn on for this work—include one that treats economic matters as ideas (or "thought"), logics, metaphors, or structural paradigms; one that focuses on the economic conditions of Literary production; and one that deals with the formal, generic, and commodity features that have allowed Literary writing to attain a degree of relative autonomy since the late eighteenth century. In what is admittedly an inadequate survey, let me consider each of these categories individually.

The first category is the largest and most complex. In it I include, for example, histories of economic theory like those by David Kauffman, Regenia Gagnier, and Catherine Gallagher (to name only a few recent and important studies); considerations of an underlying "logic" of capital or capitalism, like the work of James Cruise and Deirdre Lynch; treatments of economic images or the metaphor of the "economy" itself, like the important works by Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux; and various studies of representations of commerce, economic issues, and financial figures or attitudes toward business, capital, and finance, like the work of Edward Copeland, James Thompson, Liz Bellamy, Patrick Brantlinger, and Colin Nicholson (again, to cite only some of the most prominent).13 Even though these studies are different in significant ways, I group them together because, in some important sense, they all focus on the ideas or concepts implicit in some system of representation, whether that system is eighteenth-century political economy, modern economism, capitalism, language, or one or more Literary texts. Even the work closest in subject matter to Genres of the Credit Economy, Catherine Gallagher's The Body Economic, is primarily engaged with the content of various texts and only incidentally attentive to genre or discipline.

While I agree that systems of representation, including economic representational systems (like money, political economy, and capitalism), can


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While I agree that systems of representation, including economic representational systems (like money, political economy, and capitalism), can be said to contain and to convey ideas (like functional equivalence, free market individualism, and the effacement of labor by abstractions), and while I agree that these concepts have been important, in this book I argue that such ideas become operative only in and through the writing in which they are formulated and received. By emphasizing the genres by which such writings have been organized and the conventions and hierarchies of forms by which various kinds of writing were distinguished from each other, I want to stress how various ideas were rendered socially usable. Thus, I am less interested in the explicit content of economic treatises or the ideas that we can infer from the representational systems associated with them than in the way that various forms of writing participated in the social process of classification and ranking, by which economic writing and imaginative writing were first distinguished from each other as they were refined for different social roles, then ranked, both internally and in relation to each other. In this regard, Genres of the Credit Economy resembles Michael McKeon's Secret History of Domesticity, which also focuses on the early modern "division of knowledge/' I discuss McKeon's work in more detail in chapter 2. Here, suffice it to say that, as his emphasis on "knowl-edge" rather than "genre" suggests, McKeon engages this subject at a greater level of abstraction than I do.

My second category contains samples of recent scholarship on the economics of Literary production. This work has been invaluable to me, and I could not have written this book without the painstaking research of scholars like Paula McDowell, James Raven, Peter Garside, Rainer Schowerling, and William St. Clair.14 They have uncovered new archives, found innovative (often digital) ways of sorting through known archives whose sheer size had previously stymied researchers, and organized their findings in usable systems of narratives, lists, statistics, and databases. Because of their labor, the printed materials of what is now called the long eighteenth century are searchable to a degree and visible in ways never previously possible. These scholars have added to an existing body of archival work on Literary publication, mostly involving the nineteenth century, that includes pioneering books by Richard Altick, John Sutherland, Guinevere Griest, Lee Erickson, and David Finkelstein.15 While these scholarly works overlap with the category that Woodmansee and Olson call production, they tend not to focus on individual writers so much as the place that Literary publishing occupied in British economic and social relations. The shift away from individual writers to the institution of publishing helps replace the author-centric preoccupations of much traditional scholarship with a more sociological consideration of the ways that individual efforts are facilitated and constrained by the existing conditions of production.


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cilitated and constrained by the existing conditions of production. While these scholars—and I—give some attention to the technological innovations (in printing and papermaking) that helped accelerate Literary production during these two centuries, none of us insists that technology determined this speedup. Instead, many of the scholars I have cited assign more importance to legal, political, and industry-specific factors—like the passage, then repeal, of taxes on certain kinds of publications; various pieces of copyright legislation; and the cartel-like power exercised by printers and booksellers in the middle decades of the eighteenth century and by the circulating libraries between 1842 and 1894. I follow the lead of these scholars on this important matter, but I do expand their focus on the Literary publishing industry to include the factors that made the volume of economic and financial publications expand during these same decades. This expansion—in both volume and kind of financial genres—overlapped with and underwrote the expansion of the Literary publishing industry in interesting ways, and one of the themes I explore in the first interchapter in particular is how looking at these two expansions together changes our understanding of both.

The third important category of Literary scholarship contains fewer members than my first two groupings, but these works have influenced this book in profound ways. These works—the pathbreaking essays on genre by Ralph Cohen, studies of eighteenth-century print by Clifford Siskin and William Warner, and John Guillory" s important treatment of the canon as a social form—differ from each other in their immediate focus: Cohen's essays tend to be theoretical metacommentaries on genre, both Siskin and Warner work on eighteenth-century texts, and Guillory moves from antiquity to twentieth-century Literary scholarship.16 Nevertheless, all these scholars assign genres (and other dassificatory systems) a central role in the configuration and reconfiguration of social situations. In allowing us to see some of the ways that the procedures of classification and ranking inherent in the process of generic differentiation participated in social processes, all these scholars present the history of our discipline in a new and exciting way.

This is the point at which my work parts company from the important contributions of these scholars. Even Siskin's inclusive term writing, after all-in failing systematically to discriminate among kinds of writing—understates the extent to which disciplinary differentiation was a critical counterpart to the classification and ranking that occurred within a single set of genres. More specifically, while attentive to generic differentiation, Cohen, Warner, and Guillory are all primarily concerned with Literary writing;


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thus, they miss the opportunity to discuss the social processes by which disciplines were differentiated from each other alongside, and as part of, generic reworking and innovation. While one could certainly expand the number of disciplines beyond the two I isolate here, by focusing on the differentiation of economic writing from Literary writing, I can offer a methodological model that future scholars might adapt. By proposing that the relationships among genres and disciplines are the outcomes of a historical process of delimitation, ranking, and differentiation, I suggest a way of thinking about the relationship between the modern disciplines that might help explain why some now seem self-evidently more valuable than others.
Let me conclude this introduction with a few comments about the arrangement of this book, a description of the narrative that follows, and some observations on method. Since Genres of the Credit Economy focuses on generic differentiation, it has not seemed amiss to engage in a bit of generic innovation myself. Some of the materials that I have included in the following pages do not fit easily into the historical narrative that dominates the chapters, either because they contain information that is useful for understanding the entire book (the preamble), or because they contain historical or methodological treatments of issues that specifically comment on the chapters that follow them (the two interchapters). I have elected to place each of these discussions in a separate section as a way of signaling the departure they make from the chronological narrative the chapters unfold. This will also make it easier for readers to find the parts of this book most relevant to their interests. Readers already familiar with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century genres might want to skip the preamble, those familiar with the late-eighteenth-century takeoff of print and the Bank Restriction Act are excused from the first interchapter, and those not especially interested in debates among contemporary Literary critics can simply skim the second interchapter. These asides have allowed me to provide information or develop arguments that I consider essential to this book, but my feelings will not suffer if others don't agree.

After the preamble, which provides an overview of the genres I deal with in this book, I begin my chronological narrative. The first two chapters deal with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and illuminate the existence, then breakup of the continuum of writing that generated, then broke up the fact/fiction continuum. Chapter 1 highlights some of the intricacies that characterized the relationship between writing about money and the forms of writing that functioned as money in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain,


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century Britain, This relationship was intricate because, contrary to what we might expect (and unlike the correlation we find after 1797), the volume of writing about money did not simply increase as (or because) the forms of circulating money increased. Instead, before the Restriction period, commentaries about money proliferated in the years in which the value of the monetary instruments themselves seemed dubious—either because, as in the case of coins, these instruments had visibly lost some of the precious metal that theoretically guaranteed their worth, or because, as with paper money, the institutions that issued them seemed to have overreached themselves. Thus, the discussions of money that I explore in this chapter constituted attempts to use some kinds of writing to stabilize (or interrogate) the value of another by masking (or exposing) the problematic of representation that separates the tokens that represent value from its deferred ground in any money economy.

In chapter 2,1 address the process by which the fact/fiction continuum was broken up during the eighteenth century, especially in imaginative writing. I begin with Daniel Defoe's early writings on credit, for these works reveal both the existence of the continuum in the first decades of the eighteenth century and the way that writing that was not generically marked, as subsequent writing was, could mediate value without distinguishing between facts and fictions. I also give considerable attention to the imaginative text that modem publishers title Roxana, first to explore the ways that Defoe helped readers understand, and, thus, learn to trust, unfamiliar features of the credit system, then to reveal how subsequent publishers revised Defoe's text (and changed his title) in order to make this volume conform to what was repeatedly identified after 1740 as the norms of a distinct—and distinctly fictional—form, the novel.

Chapter 2 also examines two other facets of the breakup of the fact/ fiction continuum. These include, on the one hand, the emergence of an in-cipient disciplinary division and, on the other, the persistence of a generic reminder of the vitality the continuum had once had. Thus, we see in the appearance of Steuart's Principles of Political Economy and the launch of a series of periodicals dedicated to reviewing new imaginative works the rudiments of what would eventually become the distinct disciplines of economics and Literary studies. This disciplinary distinction, however, was not completely aligned with distinct genres, as one might expect. Instead, what we find are numerous texts that look, in retrospect, like generic hybrids because they contain features that were beginning to be separated and allocated to different generic kinds. The hybrids that I examine in this chapter, which include Thomas Bridges's Adventures of a Bank-Note and Steuart's Principles, reveal


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that vestiges of the fact/fiction continuum persisted even as genres were being distinguished from each other. The number and variety of these hybrids also suggest that they continued to make sense to readers, even though the process of generic differentiation was already under way. As we will see in chapter 5, subsequent attempts to reinforce the distinction between economic and Literary writing often, targeted such hybrids, even though they continued to be written and published. Chapter 2 also inaugurates the discussion to which I return in chapters 3 and 4, showing how monetary instruments gradually passed beneath the horizon of cultural visibility as they lost their status as writing and came simply to seem to embody value.

The first of two interchapters provides a transition from the eighteenth-century materials to their nineteenth-century counterparts. In it, I discuss the dramatic increases in the volume of bank paper and book paper that occurred in turn-of-the-century Britain. While these increases occurred almost at the same time, they were different in significant ways: they were not caused by the same factors, and they did not take homologous forms. The writing that functioned as money proliferated as a direct consequence of the 1797 Restriction Act, for, by curtailing the obligation of the Bank of England to redeem its notes with gold, this legislation indirectly encouraged the formation of country banks and the issue of provincial paper. Writing about money was provoked by this legislation as well, both because the Restriction rendered the fictitious nature of all paper money visible and because, as the value of paper money rose and fell, contemporaries were driven to speculate about its merits. Thus, the 1797 act, as well as the 1810 Bullion Report (which advocated revoking the Restriction), immediately incited more writing of a theoretical kind, as a consequence of the written legislation that inaugurated the Restriction in the first place.

New legislation also led to a late-century increase in the volume of imaginative writing. The critical law in this regard was the 1774 act curtailing perpetual copyright, which had prevailed for most of the eighteenth century. As publishers rushed to take advantage of the opportunities introduced by the Booksellers' Act, imaginative writers also developed innovative genres that capitalized on Britain's growing market for all kinds of leisure goods, including print. Among these genres were Gothic novels, which drew their inspiration from sensational events in France, and cheap political tracts, which expressed the political yearnings of the British poor. As we will see in chapters 5 and 6, the increase in kinds of imaginative writing and the attendant commodification of print almost immediately provoked attempts by some writers to establish a boundary between what they considered Literature and every other form of imaginative writing.


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Even though the proliferations of paper in the monetary realm and in economic and imaginative writing stemmed from different causes and took different forms, they need to be considered together, for they all had implications for the problematic of representation. This is clearest in regard to the monetary genres, for the explosion in the volume of paper money made the fiction inherent in this monetary form visible again. As economic writers scrambled to explain this fiction away, they invoked the more general distinction between fact and fiction to enhance the authority of their writing. For their part, writers like Wordsworth and Coleridge tried to deny that their work was related in any way either to developments in the mar-ket or to fact-based, genres like economic theory. To do so, they tried to distinguish among kinds of imaginative writing—not by appealing to the distinction between fact and fiction, but by discriminating among various functions, which they claimed were natural to different kinds of writing.

Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the discipline of political economy, the antecedent of modern economics. Unlike most historians of economics, who focus exclusively on the discipline's march toward a fully mathematical science, I highlight three sociological features of nineteenth-century political economy. They include the ability of what I call establishment economists to elaborate and adapt the theories bequeathed to them by eighteenth-century theorists while denigrating rival formulations or attempts to make other issues seem more salient; the creation of a hierarchy internal to the genres by which theory was separated from the popular versions in which others extended the reach of theorists7 ideas; and practitioners' ability, when they reached the limits of their scientific method, to revert to or borrow from imaginative writing to render aesthetically pleasing events that troubled the explanatory paradigms of economic writing.

In chapter 3,1 show how establishment economists created a theoretical consensus. They did so partly by settling differences among themselves, as we can see in a debate that erupted immediately after the Restriction Act. This debate, which concerned the role that paper money should play in Britain's credit economy, involved a number of writers who differed on local issues but agreed about economic essentials. Even though Walter Boyd, William Harrison, and Lord Peter King challenged the Restriction Act and Henry Thornton and Francis Baring defended it, all these men simply assumed that competition meant progress, paper money extended credit, and no nation lacking either would prosper in the modern age. In the next section of this chapter, I show how establishment economists marginalized writers who disagreed with their theoretical commonplaces. Here my focus is William Cobbett, who insisted that the truisms of classical political



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economy supported not the nation as a whole but only people who benefited from Britain's ''funding system": the directors of the Bank of England, stockholders, and the members of Parliament who protected them. Cobbett was also engaged in a debate, then, but, because most establishment writers wrote primarily to and for each other, he staged this debate in the pages of his writing. By incorporating the words of his opponents into his own texts, he tried to reverse the process by which the economic establishment tried to marginalize him. By highlighting the position of marginality that Cobbett simultaneously embraced and was assigned, I explain both the ambition and the limits of his campaign: he wanted to expose the fiction inherent in paper money to bring the government down, but members of the economic establishment simply insisted that paper was not fiction and that, even if it was, it was a fiction necessary to Britain's prosperity. The third debate I consider in this chapter, the protracted discussions that led up to the passage of the 1844 Bank Act, reveals how economic writers developed an increasingly technical vocabulary to account for phenomena that contemporaries found deeply troubling. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of another currency radical, the printer John Francis Bray. Bray's Labour's Wrongs and Labours Remedies (1838-39) shares with Cob-betfs Paper against Gold (1810-11) the recognition that the Restriction Act had politicized paper money, but the remedies suggested in it were so at odds with the conventions of political economic writing that his impact was as marginal as was the position to which Cobbett was relegated by the third decade of the century.

Chapter 4 focuses on the division of labor informally adopted by nineteenth-century economic writers. In this discussion, I not only highlight the way the discipline attained the status of a science but also test the limits of political economists' claims to adapt scientific principles to describe economic events. Specifically, I focus on various economic writers' treatments of the speculative manias and panics that periodically disrupted Britain's mature credit economy. These treatments—and their failures—are important both because manias and panics disturbed the optimistic picture of capitalism that establishment economists tried to present and because economists' inabilityto explain them marked the limits of their method. In the first section of this chapter, I describe the process by which writers generally considered the century's leading theorists defined the characteristic method and genres of political economy. These men include David Ricardo, J. R. McCulloch, Thomas Chalmers (and, through him, Thomas Robert Malthus), John Stuart Mill, and Stanley Jevons. After Ricardo (who died before the century7s first speculative mania), each of these writers also tried to


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accommodate manias and panics into their accounts of commercial society, and the limitations of their success tell us much about the similarities that continued to link economic and imaginative writing to each other. In the second section, I turn to a less prestigious kind of economic writing, financial journalism. Here, I show how Walter Bagehot, D. Morier Evans, and Laurence Oliphant tackled the problem of manias and panics in genres designed to appeal to readers not trained in political economic theory. Even though these popularizers also failed to explain why manias and panics occurred—in terms that modern economists would consider satisfactory； at any rate—their ability to demystify the operations of the City and to make even the arcane language of finance familiar to ordinary Britons helped make economic theory seem relevant to everyday life and, not incidentally, made investing in shares an acceptable thing to do with money.

In the final section of chapter 4,1 engage one of the architects of what has been called the Marginalist Revolution in economic theory, W. Stanley Jevons. Jevons's work is important both because it signaled another stage in the professionalization of economics and because his attempts to model commercial crises reveal how attractive—and elusive—the dream of a fully scientific economics proved to be. As a professor, first in Manchester, then at University College, London, Jevons helped bring economic theory into the university, where it was further refined in subsequent decades. By insisting that commercial manias and panics could be correlated to a natural phenomenon whose occurrence seemed mathematically regular, he tried to dispel suspicions that some economic events were irrational by subjecting them to a fully rational, because mathematical, account. He held on to the idea that commercial crises were caused by sunspots, even when evidence failed to support this theory, because, by the late 1870s, he could assume that his formalist method, if not the figures he plugged into it, was essentially sound. As one expert writing to others, Jevons knew that, even if he could not make the numbers work, one of his colleagues eventually would.

In chapters 5 and 6,1 turn to imaginative writing to show how a handful of poets, essayists, and reviewers progressively delimited the category of Literature by creating a hierarchy that resembled economic writers7 division of labor. Whereas the groupings within economic writing divided and distributed the work of formulating and disseminating a relatively uniform interpretation of economic issues, the Literary hierarchy ruthlessly policed its own ranks in order to enforce the theoretical consensus that market forces discouraged. The public's appetite for new forms of print, in other words, and for cheap, political, and sensational genres in particular, did


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not necessarily accord with the values promoted by poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, and, as a consequence, the stage was set at the beginning of the nineteenth century for a confrontation between writers already critical of the market model of value and readers who wanted their expectations met

Chapter 5 begins with a discussion of the campaign, spearheaded by Wordsworth and Coleridge, to differentiate Literary writing from other modes of imaginative writing and from the political publications inspired by events in France. In this section, I discuss the relative status accorded different genres, Wordsworth's and Coleridge's equation of originality and longevity with Literary value, and the complex role played in the delimitation of Literature by minor Literary writers like De Quincey and reviewers like Jeffrey. I then describe the organization of the mid-nineteenth-century book market, giving particular attention to the circulating library system and its effects on writers, publishers, and readers. My argument here is that the confrontations among various sectors of the Literary establishment-elite writers, would-be popular writers, reviewers and critics, publishers and booksellers, library proprietors, and readers—produced, alongside a hierarchy of kinds of Literary writing, a hierarchical understanding of the modes of reading by which readers consumed imaginative writing. By examining efforts to discriminate among kinds of reading, I show how, by the third quarter of the century, (some) critics had managed to elevate the novel in the hierarchy of Literary kinds, in large part by endorsing the aesthetic criteria that, by that point, completely defined Literary value even in what had been (and continued to be) a popular genre.

In the second interchapter, I continue this discussion of reading, focusing now on the ways that contemporary Literary critics' treatments of texts differ so radically from the way readers not disciplined by graduate training read. This section contains my most explicit discussion of some of the methodologies used by modem Literary critics—the kind of textual interpretation often called New Historicism and a method that does not privilege interpretation, which Ian Hunter calls historical description. Using treatments of Harriet Martineau's Illustrations of Political Economy as examples, I show how contemporary Literary studies carries over the model of organic unity that Wordsworth and James associated with Literary value, and I explain why this kind of textual interpretation cannot provide evidence to support a historical argument, even one focused on something as amorphous as discourse. Historical description, which focuses on the classi-ficatory schemes that group texts into various categories and the social function they played, constitutes an alternative to the presentist bias of most


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textual interpretation by recovering the historical conditions that made some uses of texts possible while rendering others nonsensical or obsolete.

In chapter 6 I demonstrate what the practice of Literary studies might look like if we were to provide historical descriptions of individual texts instead of trying to derive interpretations from them. In this chapter, I examine four canonical Literary texts through a series of interrelated questions: What occasioned this text? How do the conventions that the author deployed work as a narrative system? How does the system of narrative seek to manage both the way the text is read and its relation to the situation that occasioned it? My argument here is that the formalism that persists in most contemporary Literary methodologies is partly a response to Literary conventions developed to curtail reference. The particular novels I examine in this chapter—and Prejudice, Little Dorrit, Silas Mamer, and The Last Chronicle of Barset—dll incorporate topics that economic writers also addressed, but they subject them to an aesthetic rationale. These novels have become canonical, in fact, partly because they lend themselves to the formalist methods now taught in most departments of English in the United States and the United Kingdom. Paradoxically, however, these novels were also popular in their own day, and generally remain so, because, to readers who have not been so disciplined, they seem to refer to the actual world, not simply to create the effect of reality within their pages. That such double modes of readings are possible suggests the transitional nature of these novels—they are simultaneously formalist, in approaching the Literary norm of the organic whole, and realistic, in the nontechnical sense of containing lifelike characters and situations. That such doubled reading is necessary reveals the fracture that runs through contemporary engagements with Literary texts, along the fault line of graduate training.

I return to the topic of the hierarchy of the modern disciplines in a brief coda, where I also offer a few thoughts about the new genres that are proliferating in cyberspace, apparently beyond the reach of all academic programs. Before dosing this introduction, however, I want to make a few additional points about my own methodology.

The first concerns the kind of historical narrative I offer here. Genres ofthe Credit Economy provides neither a Foucauldian genealogy nor a traditional cultural history. Instead, by juxtaposing the way our modern disciplines— especially the discipline of Literary studies—encourage us to read to the way past readers engaged these texts, I try to enable my readers to seethe process by which the dassificatory schemes that undergird genres and disciplines changed. This shuttling back and forth and the repeated attention I give to the categories through which I read may be distracting to some readers,



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but I want to make it difficult to ignore the twin facts that every history is constructed through such categories and that these categories—as much as the details a writer chooses to emphasize—dictate what we can understand about the past by shaping the way we understand it.

The second concerns the scope of Genres of the Credit Economy. My focus on these decades—from the late seventeenth century through the 1870s— ignores the period distinctions most scholars recognize. The more expansive scope of this book enables us to see an array of changes in the way these genres mediated the credit economy that are obscured by traditional periodization, but, particularly in the case of Literary writing, it also allows us to see why scholars have tended to treat the years between 1798 and 1832 as a distinct Romantic period. As we will see in chapter 5, during these years some Literary writers announced the value of originality, declared that their writing broke completely with its predecessors, and equated Literary value with this self-proclaimed originality. Insofar as Literary scholars have isolated a Romantic period, cutting it free from both eighteenth-century imaginative writing and the Victorian writing that followed, they have tacitly accepted these claims; but, in so doing, they have failed to notice the continuities that link these imaginative productions or to comment on the role such claims have played in the creation of the modern disciplines. By contextualizing turn-of-the-century arguments about originality, both in relation to earlier and later Literature and in relation to writing of other kinds, I have tried to show the function that the Romantic model of value has played in Literary history, in debates about the nature of value, and in the modern separation of disciplines.

A third consideration has to do with organization and style. Because the modern disciplines are separate, in the ways this book chronicles, Literary and economic histories are typically written by different scholars, and versions of each tend to have their own narrative coherence as well as distinct stylistic conventions. Putting these subjects together in chapters that contain focused arguments has required me to respect the division in subject matter to a certain extent: as I have already noted, chapters 3 and 4 deal with the economic side of the history, and chapters 5 and 6 deal with the Literary side. While this division has allowed me to present coherent narratives, however, it also means that the overall chronology of the events I describe is sometimes out of order. Readers will encounter Jevons's sunspot theory, which he developed in the early 1870s, before they read about Wordsworth's early-nineteenth-century reflections on his poetic practice, for example, and they will be asked to engage with Jane Austen's late-eighteenth-century



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novel, Pride and Prejudice, after they have learned about Henry James's late-nineteenth-century theories about the nature of novelistic art. I have tried to provide enough thematic commentary and chronological narrative to overcome whatever difficulties this might pose, but I do acknowledge that the order of my narrative may require patience. In terms of stylistic conventions, I have decided to use present-tense verbs to describe the events that a text narrates, as Literary critics typically do, and past-tense verbs to describe historical actions, as some—but not all—historians do. In some sentences, this has led to what may seem like stylistic inconsistency, but I have wanted to call attention at the level of my style to the difference between textual events and actual ones—a difference that, as we will see in chapters 5 and 6, nineteenth-century Literary conventions helped efface by so expanding textuality that it seems to engulf everything outside the text.

Finally, in order to develop the argument of this book with enough detail to do justice to its complexities, I have found it necessary to limit my focus to Britain and British writing and to English money and the English financial system. By using variants of Britain, of course, instead of Great Britain, I artificially lop off huge sectors of what, by the late eighteenth century, had become an empire; and, by focusing only on English monetary arrangements, I exclude the two complex subjects of Scots and Irish money and the Scottish banking system, both of which were extremely important in these centuries. I am all too aware of the sacrifices that these limitations have exacted. Every credit economy is also an economy of debt and, during these centuries in particular, English investors' extraordinary rate of return on their capital was largely obtained through overseas investment. As a consequence, to omit all discussion of India and the West Indies, in particular, is to present an admittedly one-sided picture of the global system of credit and debt whose legacy still casts such a long shadow across the world.17 By the same token, because the monetary systems of Ireland and Scotland presented challenges that were different from those that English money posed, and because many of the solutions to banking problems were initially worked out in Scotland, failing to discuss these subjects deprives me of important comparative cases. Similarly, not even to mention the market for exported British Literary writing in Englished countries like India risks attributing too much credit for the delimitation of Literature to a few men and women in England.18 While I fully acknowledge the importance of both comparative studies and placing the British story in a larger context, I have elected a narrower canvas in order to offer greater detail about the subjects I do address. The history of disciplinary specialization that I describe


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in the following pages helps explain why the grasp of any modern scholar is more limited than her ability to understand the bigger picture. Even if this history does not excuse the limitations of my effort, it should remind us of how much still remains to be incorporated in any attempt to understand the genres in which the credit economy in which we still live came to be naturalized and understood.