Writing and the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires of the Early Eighteenth Century

by Colin Nicholson

Overview

The early eighteenth century saw a far-reaching financial revolution in England. In this original study, Colin Nicholson reads familiar texts such as Gulliver's Travels, The Beggar's Opera and The Dunciad as "capital satires," responding to the social and political effects of the installation of capitalist financial institutions in London. While they invested in stocks and shares, Swift, Pope and Gay conducted a campaign against the civic effects of new financial institutions such as the Bank of England and the inauguration of the National Debt. Conflict between these writers' inherited discourse of civic humanism and the transformations being undergone by their own society is shown to have had a profound effect on a number of key literary texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521604482
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2004
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Eighteenth-Century English Literature and Thought , #21
Pages:	240
Product dimensions:	5.91(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Preface; Abbreviations; Introduction; 1. A culture of commodities: 'Trivial Things' in The Rape of the Lock; 2. Cultivating the bubble: some investing contemporaries; 3. 'Some Very Bad Effects': The strange case of Gulliver's Travels; 4. 'Bilk'd of Virtue': The Beggar's Opera; 5. 'Abusing the City's Best Good Men': Pope's poetry of the 1730s; 6. 'Illusion on the town': Figuring out credit in The Dunciad; Bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"...this most original study centers on the effects that the financial revolution in English society...had on some of the major writers of the period...The author's approach to these works from this specialized, political-economical point of view is consistent, resourceful, elucidating, and convincing; Nicolson...has presented a very valuable argument for viewing these 18th-century writers 'in terms of a developing political economy that was permanently changing their world as they wrote'...Highly recommended to those interested in 18th-century history and literature." R. G. Brown

From the Publisher