Power, Prose, and Purse: Law, Literature, and Economic Transformations

Description

From Anthony Trollop to Sinclair Lewis, and from Jane Austen to James Joyce and John Steinbeck, many important novels touch on fundamental questions about the role of money in human affairs. These questions are explored in this volume through the lens of law and literature. The sixteen essays collected here, by important theorists from a range of disciplines, shed new light on the impact of economic change, from the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression. Students of economics and business will gain a new appreciation of literature's insights on singular events and human emotions. Similarly, scholars and students of literature will gain an appreciation for the power of law and economics to inform literary and social analysis. The volume's focus on novels about money and economic upheaval showcases the power of the disciplinary marriage of law and literature. Cover Power, Prose, and Purse Copyright Contents List of Contributors Introduction: Cooperation and Competition between Plots and Principles Part I 1. Counterfeiting Confidence: The Problem of Trust in the Age of Contract 2. Gamblers and Gentlefolk: Money, Law, and Status in Trollope’s England 3. Regulating Greed: Biographical Markers in Dos Passos’ The Big Money 4. The Morning and the Evening Star: Religion, Money, and Love in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and Elmer Gantry 5. Jay Gatsby, Justice Douglas, and the Significance of Class in American Society Part II 6. Wealth and Warfare in the Novels of Jane Austen 7. Commerce, Law, and Revolution in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë 8. Bartleby’s Consensual Dysphoria 9. Love from the Point of View of the Universe: Walt Whitman and the Utilitarian Imagination 10. Money and Art in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward 11. The Second New Deal and the Fourth Courtroom Wall: Law, Labor, and Liberty in The Cradle Will Rock 12. Raisin, Race, and the Real Estate Revolution of the Early Twentieth Century Part III 13. The Grapes of Wrath, Economics, and Luck 14. Irish [and English and American] Poets, Learn Your Trade: Law and Economics in Poetry Index