This book reveals how finance metamorphosed from an economic specialization into a hegemonic aesthetic form and, as it did so, became a site of contest and redefinition for realist and postmodern American literature. Reading contemporary novels, financiers’ autobiographies, financial journalism, visual culture, and political economy, the book covers 1979–2003, a period of stock market crashes, the advent of 24-hour banking, and the return of the individual financier to a place of social prominence. The same period witnessed the canonization of postmodernism in literary studies and a furious re ... More

This book reveals how finance metamorphosed from an economic specialization into a hegemonic aesthetic form and, as it did so, became a site of contest and redefinition for realist and postmodern American literature. Reading contemporary novels, financiers’ autobiographies, financial journalism, visual culture, and political economy, the book covers 1979–2003, a period of stock market crashes, the advent of 24-hour banking, and the return of the individual financier to a place of social prominence. The same period witnessed the canonization of postmodernism in literary studies and a furious reaction to that elevation in literary and popular cultures. Postmodern novels engaged these financial changes, as did their realist counterparts. Tracing how the discrete and often antagonistic events of financialization and its literary and cultural critiques were realized and institutionalized, the book provides a cultural history of literary form that challenges the broadly held view that finance finds its chief expression in a postmodern mode because finance is abstract and postmodernism is fragmentary. Rather, it demonstrates that in a period of financialization, journalism, realism and postmodernism were in conversation and ultimately agreement about what “finance” was. Novels used financial journalism to derive an understanding of the scene and language of finance as masculine, complex, and violent. Conversely, novelistic and filmic representation of finance encouraged journalism to consider whether a new financial era had dawned and how it should be represented. Bringing these two archives together, the book outlines a feedback loop whereby postmodernism became more canonical, realism became more postmodern, and finance became a distinct cultural object.