Credit Culture
The Politics of Money in the American Novel of the 1970s
Published on 8. July 2020
222 pages
978-1-108-87529-5 (ISBN)
Description
This book offers a new reading of the relationship between money, culture and literature in America in the 1970s. The gold standard ended at the start of this decade, a moment which is routinely treated as a catalyst for the era of postmodern abstraction. This book provides an alternative narrative, one that traces the racialized and gendered histories of credit offered by the intertextual narratives of writers such as E.L Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Marilyn French, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo. It argues that money in the 1970s is better read through a narrative of political consolidation than formal rupture as these histories foreground the closing down, rather than opening up, of serious debates about what American money should be and who it should serve. These novels and this moment remain important because they alert us to imagine the alternative histories of credit that were imaginatively proposed but never realized.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
File size
17,01 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-108-87529-5 (9781108875295)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
07/2020
Cambridge University Press
€105.50
Shipment within 15-20 days
Person
Content
Introduction; Money in the disciplines; postmodern times: E.L Doctorow's Ragtime; 1. No place like home: the cultures of American credit; 2. Don Delillo and American credit; 3. William Gaddis and corporate credit; 4. When women counted: feminism, fiction and the money economy; 5. Toni Morrison and the promise to pay; 6. Dorothy's endless return: sacrifice and gender in the novels of Thomas Pynchon.
