2007
Leigh Claire La Berge
- Doctoral Candidate
- New York University
![Picture of Leigh Claire La Berge](https://www.acls.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/B3E87987-B016-DC11-9D54-000C2903E717.jpg)
Abstract
This project investigates the representation of finance in twentieth-century American texts by linking aesthetic form with the social inequalities produced by financial mechanisms. It begins with the early twentieth-century laissez-faire era, when the term “finance capital” began to circulate in political economy, and the individual financier emerged as a key protagonist in naturalist fiction. Secondly, it examines the postwar period when financial instruments, including federally backed home mortgages and credit cards, were deployed on a national scale in order to enable mass consumption and were further represented as plot devices in a series of novels and films. The study concludes with the 1980s Reagan-era, when finance was associated with violence and paranoia in popular financial novels of the period.