| Series |
Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Oxford studies in American literary history. ^A1192190
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| Contents |
Machine generated contents note: 1. Hamilton and the Complex Stories of Public Credit -- David Hume's Plausible Fictions -- Fictions in the Report on Public Credit -- Organizing Commerce -- Incredible Stories -- Real Value, Real Bodies -- Letter of the Law and the Bank of the United States -- Encyclopedic Order -- 2. Jefferson and the Simple Story of Pastoral Economies -- American Pastoral -- Poetics of the Representative Anecdote -- American Physiocracy -- George Logan's Simple Truths -- John Taylor of Caroline's Simple Vocabulary -- Manufacturing the Simple System -- 3. Stories without Plots -- Stores and Magazines -- Weaving with Philip Freneau -- Gleaning with Judith Sargent Murray -- Scribbling with Charles Brockden Brown -- 4. The Slave as System -- Calculating Worth -- Plotting Objects -- Narrating Slavery -- Weaving with Ukawsaw Gronniosaw -- Reckoning with Venture Smith -- Mapping with Boyrereau Brinch -- Conclusion: Explaining the Economy in the Twenty-First Century. |
| Summary |
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. 0'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. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages [275]-311-[313]-324) and index. |
| Access restriction | Available only to authorized users. |
| Technical details | Mode of access: World Wide Web |
| Genre/form | Electronic books. |
| LCCN | 2020939157 |
| ISBN | 9780198859130 (hardcover) |
| ISBN | 0198859139 (hardcover) |
