Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 / Edition 1

by Patrick Brantlinger

Overview

In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present. He draws on literary texts ranging from Augustan satire such as Gulliver's Travels to postmodern satire such as Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note. All critique the misrecognition of public credit as wealth.

The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money. Brantlinger traces the emergence of modern, imperial Great Britain from those foundations. He analyzes the process whereby nationalism, both the cause and the result of wars and imperial expansion, multiplied national debt and produced crises of public credit resolved only through more nationalism and war. During the first half of the eighteenth century, conservatives attacked public credit as fetishistic and characterized national debt as alchemical. From the 1850s, the stabilizing theories of public credit authored by David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Thornton, and others, helped initiate the first "social science" economics.

In the nineteenth century, literary criticism both paralleled and questioned early capitalist discourse on public credit and nationalism, while the Victorian novel refigured debt as the individual, private credit and debt. During the era of high modernism and Keynesian economics, the notion of high culture as genuine value recast the debate over money and national indebtedness. Brantlinger relates this cultural-historical trajectory to Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories about the decline of the European empires after World War II, the global debt crisis, and the weakening of western nation-states in the postmodern era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801482878
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	05/02/1996
Series:	Institutional Studies
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.81(d)
Lexile:	1580L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Patrick Brantlinger is Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Indiana University. He is also the author of Bread and Circuses: Theories of Mass Cultures as Social Decay and Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, both from Cornell.

What People are Saying About This

Regina Gagnier

Patrick Brantlinger is one of our leading cultural historians. In this new work on empire, debt, and fetishism, he extends his temporal and theoretical range.

David Evans

Brantlinger marches with surprising thoroughness across a tremendous range of texts and history.... His discussion of the way philosophers of money.... treat issues of national credit is comprehensive and helpful to his overall argument.... In short, given the immensity of the subject and the tremendous range of materials Brantlinger treats, his achievement is impressive and illuminating.

Editorial Reviews

Brantlinger's immensely learned third book carries on the current fashion in literary criticism of culture critique, employing both Marxist and postmodern categories.

-- "Choice"

From the Publisher

"Brantlinger's immensely learned third book carries on the current fashion in literary criticism of culture critique, employing both Marxist and postmodern categories."

Choice