Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States
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.

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.
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Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States
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.

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.
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Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States

Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States

by Elizabeth Hewitt
Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States

Speculative Fictions: Explaining the Economy in the Early United States

by Elizabeth Hewitt

Paperback

$44.99 
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Overview

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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780192871381
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Publication date: 11/08/2022
Series: Oxford Studies in American Literary History
Pages: 344
Product dimensions: 8.80(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Hewitt, Professor of English, Department of English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, USA

Elizabeth Hewitt is a professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University, Columbus. She is the author of Correspondence and American Literature, 1770-1865 (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and editor of The Letters and Early Epistolary Writings of Charles Brockden Brown and Edgar Allan Poe: A Case Study in Critical Controversy.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Hamilton's CountryChapter 1 Hamilton and the Encyclopedic Stories of Public CreditChapter 2 Jefferson and the Simple Story of Pastoral EconomiesChapter 3 Stories without PlotsChapter 4 The Slave as SystemConclusion
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