The Vulgar Question of Money

The Vulgar Question of Money PDF Author: Elsie B. Michie
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded woman whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common marriage plot reveals about changing reactions to money in British culture. It was in the novel that writers found space to articulate the anxieties surrounding money that developed along with the rise of capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses in particular on the character of the wealthy heiress and how she, unlike her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British society between the desire for wealth and advancement and the fear that economic development would blur the traditional boundaries of social classes. Michie explores how novelists of the period captured with particular vividness England’s ambivalent emotional responses to its own financial successes and engaged questions identical to those raised by political economists and moral philosophers. Each chapter reads a novelist alongside a contemporary thinker, tracing the development of capitalism in Britain: Jane Austen and Adam Smith and the rise of commercial society, Frances Trollope and Thomas Robert Malthus and industrialism, Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot and the political influence of money, Margaret Oliphant and John Stuart Mill and professionalism and managerial capitalism, and Henry James and Georg Simmel and the shift of economic dominance from England to America. Even the great romantic novels of the nineteenth century cannot disentangle themselves from the vulgar question of money. Michie’s fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and economics as it is about personal choice.

The Vulgar Question of Money

The Vulgar Question of Money PDF Author: Elsie B. Michie
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421402327
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
It is a familiar story line in nineteenth-century English novels: a hero must choose between money and love, between the wealthy, materialistic, status-conscious woman who could enhance his social position and the poorer, altruistic, independent-minded woman whom he loves. Elsie B. Michie explains what this common marriage plot reveals about changing reactions to money in British culture. It was in the novel that writers found space to articulate the anxieties surrounding money that developed along with the rise of capitalism in nineteenth-century England. Michie focuses in particular on the character of the wealthy heiress and how she, unlike her male counterpart, represents the tensions in British society between the desire for wealth and advancement and the fear that economic development would blur the traditional boundaries of social classes. Michie explores how novelists of the period captured with particular vividness England’s ambivalent emotional responses to its own financial successes and engaged questions identical to those raised by political economists and moral philosophers. Each chapter reads a novelist alongside a contemporary thinker, tracing the development of capitalism in Britain: Jane Austen and Adam Smith and the rise of commercial society, Frances Trollope and Thomas Robert Malthus and industrialism, Anthony Trollope and Walter Bagehot and the political influence of money, Margaret Oliphant and John Stuart Mill and professionalism and managerial capitalism, and Henry James and Georg Simmel and the shift of economic dominance from England to America. Even the great romantic novels of the nineteenth century cannot disentangle themselves from the vulgar question of money. Michie’s fresh reading of the marriage plot, and the choice between two women at its heart, shows it to be as much about politics and economics as it is about personal choice.

Money

Money PDF Author: John Kenneth Galbraith
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691171661
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
Money is nothing more than what is commonly exchanged for goods or services, so why has understanding it become so complicated? In Money, renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith cuts through the confusions surrounding the subject to present a compelling and accessible account of a topic that affects us all. He tells the fascinating story of money, the key factors that shaped its development, and the lessons that can be learned from its history. He describes the creation and evolution of monetary systems and explains how finance, credit, and banks work in the global economy. Galbraith also shows that, when it comes to money, nothing is truly new—least of all inflation and fraud.

Burning Money

Burning Money PDF Author: C. Fred Blake
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824860101
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
For a thousand years across the length and breadth of China and beyond, people have burned paper replicas of valuable things—most often money—for the spirits of deceased family members, ancestors, and myriads of demons and divinities. Although frequently denigrated as wasteful and vulgar and at times prohibited by governing elites, today this venerable custom is as popular as ever. Burning Money explores the cultural logic of this common practice while addressing larger anthropological questions concerning the nature of value. The heart of the work integrates Chinese and Western thought and analytics to develop a theoretical framework that the author calls a “materialist aesthetics.” This includes consideration of how the burning of paper money meshes with other customs in China and around the world. The work examines the custom in contemporary everyday life, its origins in folklore and history, as well as its role in common rituals, in the social formations of dynastic and modern times, and as a “sacrifice” in the act of consecrating the paper money before burning it. Here the author suggests a great divide between the modern means of cultural reproduction through ideology and reification, with its emphasis on nature and realism, and previous pre-capitalist means through ritual and mystification, with its emphasis on authenticity. The final chapters consider how the burning money custom has survived its encounter with the modern global system and internet technology. Innovative and original in its interpretation of a common ritual in Chinese popular religion, Burning Money will be welcomed by scholars and students of Chinese religion as well as comparative religion specialists and anthropologists interested in contemporary social theory.

The Chocolate Money

The Chocolate Money PDF Author: Ashley Prentice Norton
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547840047
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
After being raised in 1980s Chicago by a promiscuous mother, Bettina Ballentyne, the daughter of a chocolate heiress struggles to walk the line between self-preservation and self-destruction at an East Coast prep school.

The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe

The Monetary Imagination of Edgar Allan Poe PDF Author: Heinz Tschachler
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786475838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 231

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Book Description
In this first-of-its-kind treatment, Heinz Tschachler offers an account of Edgar Allan Poe's relation to the world of banking and money in antebellum America. He contends that Poe gave the full force of his censure to the acrimonious debates about America's money, Andrew Jackson's bank war, the panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression, and the nation's inability to furnish a "sound and uniform currency." Poe's attitude is overt in his early satires, more subdued in "The Gold-Bug," and almost an undercurrent in writings that enter into and historicize the discovery of gold in California. In Poe's writings much is concealed, though his art also reveals while it conceals, in this instance, a deep felt desire for an authority that would guarantee a measure of permanence and continuity to the nation' s currency. That kind of currency was finally furnished by Abraham Lincoln (both were born in 1809; Poe died in 1849), at one time a dedicated reader of Poe's tales and sketches. Wielding his "power of regulation," Lincoln came to save the Union not just militarily but also economically. Under him, the United States government finally provided the kind of "sound and uniform currency" that Poe in his writings could only name and rehearse.

Other People’s Money

Other People’s Money PDF Author: Neil Forsyth
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1529942942
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
The true story behind the BBC documentary Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster 'The crime of fraud, when conducted well, is a fascinating pursuit. It’s a test of intellect, determination and stamina. It is a floating mess of fact and fiction that you have to carry in your mind for twenty-four hours a day. It can be used to realize dreams, to slip on any mask required.’ Elliot Castro was just a teenager when he began to use his formidable intelligence and charm to swindle millions from the credit card system. No outside individual has ever pulled off this scale of fraudulent activity. But the money wasn’t funding an addiction or other criminal enterprises; Elliot was simply a working-class kid with no qualifications who wanted to see the world. From London to New York, Ibiza to Beverly Hills, Castro lived a fantasy life. He stayed in famous hotels, travelled first class and blew a small fortune on designer clothes and champagne. Time after time, Elliot managed to wriggle free of the authorities while his life spiralled out of control. As he juggled aliases, and lied to family and friends, he began to lose his grip on reality. Meanwhile, a detective from Heathrow Police Station was patiently tracking him down. It would soon turn into an international manhunt. In Other People’s Money, Neil Forsyth chronicles Elliot’s extraordinary journey. A gripping tale of charm and deceit, filled with humour and heart-stopping suspense, this true story offers a fascinating insight into the mind of Britain’s most audacious, and friendliest, credit card fraudster.

For Better, For Worse

For Better, For Worse PDF Author: Carolyn Lambert
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351855360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
This interdisciplinary volume explores the fictional portrayal of marriage by women novelists between 1800 and 1900. It investigates the ways in which these novelists used the cultural form of the novel to engage with and contribute to the wider debates of the period around the fundamental cultural and social building block of marriage. The collection provides an important contribution to the emerging scholarly interest in nineteenth-century marriage, gender studies, and domesticity, opening up new possibilities for uncovering submerged, marginalized, and alternative stories in Victorian literature. An initial chapter outlines the public discourses around marriage in the nineteenth century, the legal reforms that were achieved as a result of public pressure, and the ways in which these laws and economic concerns impacted on the marital relationship. It beds the collection down in current critical thinking and draws on life writing, journalism, and conduct books to widen our understanding of how women responded to the ideological and cultural construct of marriage. Further chapters examine a range of texts by lesser-known writers as well as canonical authors structured around a timeline of the major legal reforms that impacted on marriage. This structure provides a clear framework for the collection, locating it firmly within contemporary debate and foregrounding female voices. An afterword reflects back on the topic of marriage in the nineteenth- century and considers how the activism of the period influenced and shaped reform post-1900. This volume will make an important contribution to scholarship on Victorian Literature, Gender Studies, Cultural Studies, and the Nineteenth Century.

Romance's Rival

Romance's Rival PDF Author: Talia Schaffer
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190627514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
Romance's Rival argues that the central plot of the most important genre of the nineteenth century, the marriage plot novel, means something quite different from what we thought. In Victorian novels, women may marry for erotic desire--but they might, instead, insist on "familiar marriage," marrying trustworthy companions who can offer them socially rich lives and futures of meaningful work. Romance's Rival shows how familiar marriage expresses ideas of female subjectivity dating back through the seventeenth century, while romantic marriage felt like a new, risky idea. Undertaking a major rereading of the rise-of-the-novel tradition, from Richardson through the twentieth century, Talia Schaffer rethinks what the novel meant if one tracks familiar-marriage virtues. This alternative perspective offers new readings of major texts (Austen, the Brontës, Eliot, Trollope) but it also foregrounds women's popular fiction (Yonge, Oliphant, Craik, Broughton). Offering a feminist perspective that reads the marriage plot from the woman's point of view, Schaffer inquires why a female character might legitimately wish to marry for something other than passion. For the past half-century, scholars have valorized desire, individuality, and autonomy in the way we read novels; Romance's Rival asks us to look at the other side, to validate the yearning for work, family, company, or social power as legitimate reasons for women's marital choices in Victorian fiction. Comprehensive in its knowledge of several generations of scholarship on the novel, Romance's Rival convinces us to re-examine assumptions about the nature and function of marriage and the role of the novel in helping us not simply imagine marriage but also process changing ideas about what it might look like and how it might serve people.

The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen

The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen PDF Author: Cheryl A. Wilson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429675259
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 637

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Book Description
First published anonymously, as ‘a lady’, Jane Austen is now among the world’s most famous and highly revered authors. The Routledge Companion to Jane Austen provides wide-ranging coverage of Jane Austen’s works, reception, and legacy, with chapters that draw on the latest literary research and theory and represent foundational and authoritative scholarship as well as new approaches to an author whose works provide seemingly endless inspiration for reinterpretation, adaptation, and appropriation. The Companion provides up-to-date work by an international team of established and emerging Austen scholars and includes exciting chapters not just on Austen in her time but on her ongoing afterlife, whether in the academy and the wider world of her fans or in cinema, new media, and the commercial world. Parts within the volume explore Jane Austen in her time and within the literary canon; the literary critical and theoretical study of her novels, unpublished writing, and her correspondence; and the afterlife of her work as exemplified in film, digital humanities, and new media. In addition, the Companion devotes special attention to teaching Jane Austen.

The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900

The Cultural Politics of Blood, 1500-1900 PDF Author: Kimberly Anne Coles
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137338210
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.