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Economic Criticism

Abstract

This year’s review of work in economic criticism focuses on three points of interest that reflect the year’s work in economic theory, providing an overview of some of the broader critical enquiries preoccupying the field of economic writing in 2023 and early 2024. The first is the intersection of animal studies and Marxism, exemplified by Leigh Claire La Berge’s Marx for Cats: A Radical Bestiary. The second key aspect of economic writing this year is the overlapping concerns of women, money, and property, represented here in Lana L. Dalley’s edited collection, Women’s Economic Writing in the Nineteenth Century and Jill Rappoport’s Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction. The third focus lands on speculative time and futurity within the domain of American literature, capitalism, and finance, as Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis astutely captures.

Introduction

Recent publishing in the domain of economic theory and writing highlights the field’s inherent multivalence and, as such, its continued relevance for engaging in critical and cultural theorizing in literature, film, history, newspaper reporting, long-form journalism, and much more. Beginning with Leigh Claire La Berge’s Marx for Cats, one’s attention is drawn to the impact that economic structures have had—and continue to have—on nonhuman animals. This is a work that crosses disciplinary boundaries, as evidenced by its simultaneous inclusion in this year’s review chapter on animal studies. While La Berge spotlights cats (from lions, tigers, and panthers to the domesticated Calico), her writing models a way for critics to bring other nonhuman animals into dialogue with broader economic concerns. Scholars engaging in animal studies, as well as ecocriticism, will find Marx for Cats both persuasive and generative. They may also find it compelling as a roadmap for thinking through non-Marxist economic theories as they intersect with animal studies, environmental studies, and technology–human co-evolution. As for women’s studies and questions of economy, some of this year’s strongest work implicitly undermines a long-held and outdated assumption that women were elided from the field of ‘political economy’ during most of the nineteenth century. Lana L. Dalley’s volume, Women’s Economic Writing in the Nineteenth Century, in particular, sets out to correct this misconception in her compilation of women’s economic writing. This recovered archive (naturally incomplete, yet delightfully thorough) includes women writing on economic theory itself; women exposing female domestic duties as unpaid labour in support of capitalist economic structures; and women evaluating their labour in terms of exchange value versus use value. Finally, in Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis, Paul Crosthwaite’s historicist treatment of capitalism, temporality, and futurity in 1920s and 1930s America is striking in its skilful movement from early American literary and cultural evaluation into presentist discourse—namely America’s Trump administration (2017–21) and the patterns of authoritarian governments emerging in proximity to economic crisis. The rich diversity of publications in the economic domain is evidence of the fecund nature of interdisciplinary work. Moreover, as this chapter argues, this year’s scholarship strongly reifies the value of the humanities. By looking back to the past (as all four texts considered here do), cultural and literary critics can shape the present and the future with judgement, with foresight, and, most crucially, with optimism.

1. Empire, Cats, and Marxism

Leigh Claire La Berge begins Marx for Cats by taking a risky rhetorical move: ‘The gambit of Marx for Cats is that the history of Western capitalism can be told through the cat and that doing so reveals a heretofore unrecognized animality at the heart of both Marx’s critique and Western Marxist critique’ (p. 2). The term gambit has within it an essential ambiguity: it can indicate, benignly, an opening remark made to begin a conversation; or, in a game of chess, it can be a strategic opening move, one that sacrifices a pawn ‘for the sake of a compensating advantage’ (OED). La Berge, an insightful and incisive literary critic, playfully—yet seriously—engages this ambiguity throughout the entirety of her book. The result is an equally rigorous and—dare I say it—frisky argument. Marx for Cats is, indeed, playing out both meanings of gambit: it is both beginning a conversation and deploying a series of strategic rhetorical movements. For those inclined to raise a sceptical eyebrow at a Marxist history of the cat (one replete, in true Marxist form, with a call for a cat revolution), La Berge’s work skilfully outmanoeuvres the cynic and, perhaps, may even win over cat-class-consciousness agnostics.

Like all faithful Marxists, La Berge’s grasp of historical epochs is sound and sweepingly impressive. Moreover, La Berge sees more than historical determinism in her history of the cat: she sees the opportunity for a cat revolution, a possibility for future cat-consciousness to change the course of cat-history. ‘Like any text in the Marxist tradition’, La Berge writes, ‘Marx for Cats gestures in two directions at once. In asking how our society is structured and for whom, Marxism turns toward economic history. And in the materials it finds there, it begins to conceive of how the present might have been different and how the future still could be’ (p. 3). However, before rushing toward La Berge’s feline future, in which cats are liberated, it is worthwhile to begin where La Berge herself starts: the claim that, ‘From capitalism’s feudal prehistory to its contemporary financialization, those seeking to maintain economic power as well as those seeking to challenge it have recruited cats into their efforts’ (p. 3). In doing so, this review seeks to chart out Marx for Cats’ rhetorical structures and movements, so as to mimic La Berge’s rigour—thus persuading, I hope, sceptics and sympathizers alike to engage Marx for Cats as a necessary text for today’s critical and cultural theorists.

La Berge’s project is sweeping: she seeks to ‘offe[r] a feline narrative of our economic past’ to ‘argue that Marxism not only has potential to be an interspecies project but that it already is one’ (p. 3). Part I, ‘Menace and Menagerie: The Feudal Mode of Production and its Cats, 800–1500’, brings readers back to the Middle Ages, a time when the Holy Roman Emperor and Charlemagne (and his descendants) contended for power and negotiated who would rule over whom, and how. Unlike Marx, La Berge begins in this feudal arena in part to demonstrate to readers the conscription of cats into strongholds of power—economic and otherwise. La Berge places her historical focus on a fact that is at once obvious and obscured: before the nobles were noble, they recruited the lion to help them establish power. Borrowing from the lion’s mystique, grounded in an awe-inspiring mix of grandeur, beauty, and prowess, the medieval lords and kings propagandized themselves into positions capable of oppressing the masses.

La Berge’s first historical example is Charlemagne’s father, Pepin the Short, who leveraged cats to consolidate power, control, and economies. Harnessing the lion’s mythic and majestic power, Pepin ‘staged a venatio, an old Roman-style hunting spectacle’ (p. 31). At this event, Pepin brought an ‘imported lion’ into the same arena as a bull, ‘and court spectators were invited to witness the two captives maul each other to death’ (p. 31). Like his Roman forefathers, Pepin knew that theatrics alone could not retain power; yet he also astutely assessed how effective they could be in getting one quite far in doing so. He was also the one who, approximately four centuries after Rome’s fall, begin establishing ‘some kind of standardized currency’ ‘consolidati[ng] […] different land holdings’, and—naturally—building ‘an alliance with the Catholic church’ (p. 32). Pepin passed on such achievements to his son, Charlemagne, who would go on to unite ‘lands that today span France, Germany, and parts of Italy’ (p. 32). As La Berge notes, it was from this work that feudalism ‘emerged’ and ‘which Marx calls the feudal mode of production’ (p. 32).

Charlemagne’s rise to power in Europe is well known, as is the fact that feudal fiefdoms—replete with lords, ladies, knights, and serfs—comprise capitalism’s prehistory. Where La Berge makes her critical incision into Marxist literature, however, is her consistent return to powerful men’s conscription of cats to aid the concentration of their military and economic power. Like his father, Charlemagne was sagacious in his deployment of animals: not only did he own a lion but also ‘He was known by his contemporaries as “the lion” who reigns over all living creatures and wild beasts’ (pp. 32–33, emphasis added). Upon his death, Charlemagne famously divided his kingdom among some of his sons, catalysing their own surges of rivalry and war. What captures La Berge’s attention, here, though, is that Charlemagne also ‘bequeathed […] an iconography of lions, and a style of feline accumulation: power through land and land through lions’. More important for La Berge’s history is the curious fact that, ‘Once introduced into feudal social and economic organization, the lion would never depart’ (p. 35).

Akin to any effective strategy, cat-conscription was recycled among Europe’s feudal lords and kings: moving swiftly through history, in the eleventh century and the era of William the Conqueror, La Berge notes the nobility’s calculated and persistent association with lions. One family, in particular, the ‘Lyons family’, naturally pictured a lion on their coat of arms and had, as their motto, ‘Noli irritare leones (Do not provoke the lions)’ (p. 36). As La Berge’s history delineates, ‘Nobles took “Lyons” or “Lyon” as their name. They donned emblems on their bodies, their coats of arms, and their battle helmets’ (p. 37). Such associations—such carefully deployed propaganda—ensured that ‘Lions [would come to] symbolize economic power’ (p. 37). Some of La Berge’s reinforcements include Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Paine. She quotes the former as claiming that, to be successful, a king ‘“should learn from the fox and the lion”’; she quotes the latter, whom she refers to as a ‘Marxist-lite’ thinker: ‘“to be a King requires only the animal figure of a man”’ (p. 38). From here, La Berge moves through the Crusades and Richard the Lionheart before considering the proletarian cat: that domesticated nonhuman animal who, despite its labour (mouse- and rat-killing), was continually oppressed throughout the Middle Ages.

While lions enjoyed prestige and honour (and, at least symbolically, economic power), the humble house cat became a scapegoat for social-political-religious ills. La Berge, here, refers to Pope Gregory IX’s (1170–1241, pope 1227–41 [Powell]) ‘papal bull […] [which] was one of many anti-cat screeds issued by the Catholic church in the later era of the feudal mode of production’ (p. 59). Convinced that cats were possessed by demonic spirits, his bull is often credited with initiating, infamously, the medieval proclivity to kill off cats. For La Berge, there was a materialistic and economic cause for the cat-purge:

As medieval society began to become more commercialized—as money independent of land began to circulate more broadly and with more velocity as the labor market tightened as a result of between one-third and one-half of the continent’s laborers dying during the century-long bubonic plague pandemic—feudal lords and nobles began to feel threatened by an increasing number of ‘witches,’ ‘millenarians,’ and other ‘heretics,’ many of whom were identified by their relationships with domestic cats. (p. 59)

Threats to power, for La Berge, were less perceived and more real. No economic structure is without limits inherent to its particular mode (e.g. Marx’s famous example of the moral limits, no less the physical: the factory worker must, at some point, cease working if only to eat and sleep). Social and cultural crises, such as the bubonic plague and serf revolts, ‘become truly critical and perhaps augur genuine historical transition’ (p. 59). From here, La Berge moves into the next burgeoning mode of production: merchant capitalism.

This economic transition from land acquisition to merchant capitalism ushered in the era of ‘cat persecution’, ‘cat torture’, and ‘cat massacres’ (p. 69). The associations of heretics, women, and other disruptors of the socio–economic order with cats is, as La Berge reminds us, ‘a class-based phenomenon’ (p. 75). Again grounding cat-oppression in material causes, La Berge views this occurrence within an economic paradigm, namely, that such cat-animus is best understood as a symptom of ‘the feudal order’ having ‘reach[ed] its breaking point’ (p. 86). While small felines were being purged throughout Europe, the Venetian Republic, that symbol of merchant capitalism, associated itself with the more majestic representative of the species: again, the lion. La Berge points to the ‘famous winged lion stand[ing] watch over [Venice’s] harbor’ from its perch in Piazza San Marco (p. 86). Meanwhile, with contracting land markets, economic dominance had to be gained elsewhere, and thus begins the era of national debt, bonds, and wide taxation (p. 89).

On this foundation, what La Berge calls the lion-cat dialectic, the age of empire emerges—and with it, both the imperialist, slave-holding, colonizing cat and the revolutionary one. La Berge recounts how American revolutions, like those of the English and French, leveraged the lion’s image to attain and retain power. George Washington, for instance, wielded a lion sword (p. 113) and Alexander Hamilton, the United States’ founding economic father, was called ‘“Little Lion”’ (p. 116). Thomas Jefferson, La Berge notes, placed a lion statute at Monticello (p. 114). As for those without economic and political influence, they donned the image of the tiger, represented in Marx for Cats by William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, a poem in the larger work Songs of Experience (1794). In Boston, Massachusetts, in 1776, ‘revelers removed the statehouse’s rooftop statues of a lion and unicorn, along with other symbols of royal authority, and consigned them to a bonfire’ (p. 118). Class war, as La Berge suggests, is often fought by proxy, as ‘tygers’ or panthers revolt against lions.

La Berge’s Marxist history of the cat takes on revived narrative power in Paris’s Latin Quarter, circa 1730. It was at this time and place that revolutionary fervour took revenge on the domestic cat—the feline who had just recently ‘“entered elite social circles as beloved companions”’ (Freund and Yonan, ‘Cats: The Soft Underbelly of the Enlightenment’, qtd. p. 142). The great cat massacre included a mock-trial of half-dead cats, replete with ‘guards, a confessor, and a public executioner’ (Darnton, qtd. p. 143). Gallows constructed and last rites administered, the urban proletariat achieved its goal: the sentencing and execution of their boss’s wife’s beloved cat, ‘La Grise’ (The Grey One). Although the workers’ sleep had been continually disrupted by cat wails, there was another catalyst for revolt: the food served to the labourers had first ‘been rejected by the [shop owner’s] cook as not suitable for the madame’s cats’ (p. 143).

In Part III of Marx for Cats, ‘Our Dumb Beasts: The Rise of the Bourgeoisie and its Appropriation of Cats, 1800–1900’, La Berge’s attention returns to the United States, wherein wildcat killings (in the process of westward expansion) became commodified and abstracted into currency. One chapter, ‘Wildcats’, is a particularly deft integration of Marxist, materialist historicism intersecting with posthumanist concerns (here, namely, animal studies). In the early nineteenth century, the ‘Territory of Missouri set specific values for wildcat corpses. “Panthers which shall exceed the age of six months [are] two dollars, if under that age the sum of one dollar and in the case of wildcats the sum of fifty cents each, regardless of age”’ (p. 182). The scheme worked; these large felines were hunted, killed, and removed from the land. Abstraction soon followed: the certificates hunters received were then traded as currency itself. They were, in fact, ‘deemed “legal tender for any county taxes levied within said county”’ (p. 182). Certificates entered into circulation ‘as paper money’ not only in Missouri but also in other territories: ‘Michigan, Kansas, and Nebraska’ (p. 183).

This review of La Berge’s Marxist history of the cat is naturally unable to cover the work’s trajectory in full. I hope to compel readers to include this text in their reading. Marx for Cats has much to offer literary critics as well as cultural theorists; for instance, La Berge’s reading of American Transcendentalists would be an apt addition to undergraduate and graduate syllabi. When covering Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, La Berge offers insightful close readings. She also argues, in a strongly Marxist vein, that they were ‘opposed to all the right things: slavery, imperial aggression […] and animal cruelty’, but—unimpressively—they were too hospitable, in the end, towards capitalism (p. 192). Perhaps, like their yuppie or neoliberal future comrades, their proclivity towards withdrawal rather than revolution is what garners their demotion in Marx for Cats. The litmus test, for La Berge, is as Marxist as it is straightforward and materially verifiable; unlike John Oswald, as La Berge explains, the American Transcendentalists never ‘took up arms […] [or] fought for a cause that included freedom for animals’ (p. 192).

2. Women’s Hidden Labour, Money, and Writing Political Economy

In Jane Austen’s final novel, Persuasion (1817), Anne Elliot, the heroine, famously says, ‘“Men have had every advantage of us [women] in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much a higher degree; the pen has been in their hands”’ (p. 231). The nineteenth century would prove to be the one in which women began picking up the pen and inserting themselves—uninvited, unwanted, unencouraged—into economic discourse. Lana L. Dalley’s important new compilation, Women’s Economic Writing in the Nineteenth Century, is a much-welcomed and much-needed resource for scholars in the fields of gender studies, women’s history, economic history, literary theory, and much more. Dalley’s edited collection includes four volumes, thus constituting a testament to the range and quantity of writing produced by women in the long nineteenth century (c.1789–c.1914).

The throughline of women’s economic writing in this period is bringing women’s hidden labour out of a state of obfuscation. As women took up the pen, they began enacting a two-pronged effort: first, to assert the economic value of their performance of domestic labour, which cultural authorities had long been denying; and second, to begin scripting their own economic histories, thereby challenging the nineteenth century’s often male-scripted, circumscribed economic discourse. With regard to supplying female-scripted economic theory, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics (1898) stands out. In a blend of Darwinian and Marxist paradigms, Gilman reviews human gender–economic relations within a much larger framework than Darwin or Marx had done. For instance, she recounts, ‘The female bee and ant are economically dependent, but not on the male. The workers are females, too, specialized to economic functions only’ (p. 134). Humans, she writes, ‘are the only animal species in which the female depends on the male for food, the only animal species in which the sex-relation is also an economic relation’ (p. 134). The work of Gilman’s pen, then, is to underscore this fact, and ‘make plain to ourselves the essential facts of the relation’ (p. 134). In accounting for the female portion of humanity, broadly, women consume and men produce; in Gilman’s assessment, ‘Speaking collectively, men produce and distribute wealth; and women receive it at their hands’ (p. 135). Women’s economic dependency is obscured by marriage, and especially by claims that such unions are partnerships—a word that, in its most efficacious use, implies equality in terms of contribution, power, and economic returns. While it may be true that two persons working together can produce more wealth than a unit of one (as in a business partnership), the fact of women’s economic dependence exposes the ‘partnership’ argument as incapable of persisting under scrutiny. As Gilman points out, no businessman in his right mind would actually enter into a partnership with another man whose main contribution was sweeping the floors, baking the bread, and watching his children. Or, if he were actually to make such a deal, the businessman would have to pay the floor-sweeper 50 per cent of all earnings. The first man, when doing the math, would quickly (rightly) assess he should simply hire a low-waged servant and keep far more than 50 per cent of all income collected in his business dealings, as Gilman’s argument and logic play out.

The reason that wives are not cut cheques for their floor-sweeping and cooking is, for Gilman, quite clear: to do so would be to expose a necessary lie—one that keeps men in power, women dependent, and the capitalist machinery well oiled. ‘The labor of women in the house’, Gilman writes, ‘certainly, enables men [but not women] to produce more wealth than they otherwise could’ (p. 137). Even though wives are clearly occupying the lower rung of the economic hierarchy, this does not mean they are not economic actors. In fact, the ideologies, or myths, simultaneously fuelling and obscuring this gender–economic relation depend on the uncritical belief that wives are not independent economic actors. Starkly, Gilman questions what makes the homebound wife any different than a ‘[work]horse’ or a man’s ‘valet’. Whether married to rich men or poor, wives—and their labour—have economic value: ‘The wife of the poor man, who works hard in a small house, doing all the work for the family, or the wife of a rich man, who wisely and gracefully manages a large house and administers its functions, each is entitled to fair pay for services rendered’ (p. 137).

Furthermore, if wives were actually compensated at the going rate of domestic servants, then the wife with access to education (and, subsequently, well-paid professions) would quickly do the math and decide that she ought to hire a house servant at a lower wage than said wife could make in the world of business and commerce. To do so would be to occupy a position of honesty about the economic value of a housewife’s labour. The home-bound wife enables her husband to make more money than he otherwise could, unburdened by the demands of cooking, cleaning, and childrearing (for the poorer households) or organizing dinner parties, overseeing the children’s governesses and tutors, and managing the household’s social engagements (for the richer). Gilman’s point is stark: ‘if they [wives] were thus fairly paid,—given what they earned, and no more,—all women working in this way would be reduced to the economic status of the house servant. Few women—or men either—care to face this condition’ (p. 137).

According to Simone de Beauvoir, the glaring failure of the Marx–Engels corpus is its oversight of woman’s subjectivity. It is an apt critique; Dalley’s compilation offers scholars the opportunity to see that there were women economic writers addressing this paucity. Mabel Atkinson’s (1876–1958) ‘The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement’ (1914) is another such contribution. While far more focused on a historical arc rather than on subjectivity, Atkinson’s piece, written for the Fabian Women’s Group series, carefully parses the Industrial Revolution’s impact on working-class, middle-class, and upper-class women. The second group, middle-class women, assumes much of Atkinson’s focus. This class, more than the other two, underwent a significant subjective shift in identity, becoming (or forming) a ‘parasitic’ class. Working-class women, often toiling in factories as much as in the home, simply experienced ‘ruthless exploitation’ (p. 88). The wealthy women’s subservient, ‘second’ (to borrow from Beauvoir) position to men persisted, despite the dearth of ‘economic justification’ (Atkinson, p. 87).

However, it is the middle-class woman who secures Atkinson’s attention. She argues, ‘As the economic functions of the family diminished [because of the Industrial Revolution], the daughters of lawyers, doctors, wealthy shopkeepers, and manufacturers did not work out new forms of activity for themselves’ (p. 89). Atkinson’s next sentence is blunt: ‘It would have been against the dignity of their fathers and brothers to permit them to do so’ (p. 89). These daughters comprise what Atkinson calls the ‘parasitic class’, which is also the most strongly sexed class: her sex (and the male sex’s subjective sense of dignity) determined that her life’s work pivoted around ‘Dusting, arranging the flowers, and paying calls’ (p. 89). Rightly, Atkinson positions this as ‘suffering’, a life ‘“that [is a] useless, blank, pale, slow-trailing thing” [as] one of Charlotte Brontë’s heroines so bitterly complains’ (p. 89).

Atkinson’s essay is an example of a specific vein of women’s writing, one invested in righting the wrongs of women’s subjectivity being elided from the materialist–economic explanation of history by Marx and Engels. ‘The Economic Foundations of the Women’s Movement’ also participates, however, in that uniquely Marxist bent of futurity: she foresees a revolution culminating in ‘the development of Socialism’ (p. 96), but of the kind that accounts for women’s unique position as reproducers of the human race. This magnitude of change cannot happen via reform; it cannot occur in ‘our present individualistic society’ (p. 95). Only when the state can absorb the cost of women devoting some years of their productive lives to having children can women truly become equals with men. Society must, Atkinson contends, ‘honestly […] face the fact that certain readjustments […] must be made in order that the mother may not be penalized in her later economic life by reason of her motherhood’ (p. 96). For that to happen—for this revolution to galvanize and endure—economic woman must first gain her own class consciousness. For such a conversion to take place among enough women who are proximate in terms of time and place, there must be a spiritual component. Perhaps borrowing from Hegelian dialectical models, in which Spirit gradually unfolds or reveals itself, Atkinson adds to her call for economic woman’s revolution the need to tap into that ‘great revolt of the human spirit’ (p. 83).

Atkinson’s and Gilman’s essays are but two of many examples of nineteenth-century writing that seeks to integrate female subjectivity into economic discourse. Dalley’s compilation is a call to academics to continue archival recovery; it is also a touchstone for today’s economic discourse. One implication (again, of many) that arises from Dalley’s Women’s Economic Writing is the way in which the male-oriented dialogue tends to focus on individualism and competition, while women’s writing often calls for socialism and cooperation—at both the communal and the state level. Another important element one could infer would be to see how workers’ unions in the early industrial era shared much in common with women’s economic subjectivity in the nineteenth century: both call for cooperation among the oppressed and marginalized. Each also calls for state intervention and human legislation—workers’ unions for their right to assemble and push for legal representation; women for humane accommodation of their childbearing years and a recognition that domestic labour has economic value.

This year’s work on women, property, and economy is further enriched by Jill Rappoport’s Imagining Women’s Property in Victorian Fiction. Rappoport opens her introduction with an astute quotation from Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1857), which juxtaposes a woman’s legal rights and her actual lived experience in the mid-nineteenth century. In this aptly selected scene, the turnkey of Marshalsea Prison asks a gentleman if it might be possible to bequeath property to a female absolutely and to ensure that no male relative can ‘make a grab’ at it (readers of Dickens know the turnkey wants to entitle property to his goddaughter). The gentleman, relying on the law only, affirms it is possible. After a brief Socratic-style back-and-forth, the gentleman, however, becomes quite stumped when the turnkey delivers his final question: ‘“Supposing she was tender-hearted, and they [‘“a father […] a husband”’] came over her. Where’s your law for tying it [the property] up then?”’ Failing to ascertain or articulate such a way, the gentleman grows quiet. The turnkey, for his part, ‘thought about it all his life, and died intestate after all’ (qtd. p. 1). In characteristic Dickensian style, the irony is left for readers to work through on their own. The law did not matter either way; nor did the female under consideration ever get to exercise her will. By selecting this as her opening scene, Rappoport demonstrates the complex dynamic—both in literature and in real life—among women, property, labour, economic agency, and social and cultural conditioning. Moreover, as Rappoport argues, this scene succinctly illustrates ‘the law’s inadequacy for the job’ of protecting women’s property rights (p. 2). Women’s socialization often instils in them a proclivity to please or appease male (perceived) authority figures, even at the cost of their own self- and financial interests.

What garners much of Rappoport’s attention is mapping out a critical movement within nineteenth-century economic theories and representations of women’s labour, income, and wealth in the era’s literature. In an expertly historicized project, Rappoport posits a connection between economic theory’s change in focus, from labour to consumption, as aligning with ‘the first major changes to women’s property law’ (e.g. the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 and others; p. 184). Ultimately, Rappoport resists answering absolutely whether one caused the other; she does, however, insist that ‘ignoring these legal and theoretical intersections distorts our understanding of the period’ (p. 185). Either way, Rappoport’s assessment is sharp: when economic theory pivoted to ‘circulation’, it persisted in rendering ‘women’s productive contributions to the economy’ as ‘secondary’ (p. 185). In other words, the economic value of women’s labour—something addressed in Dalley’s collection—remained either invisible or wilfully denied.

For cultural and literary critics invested in the long-nineteenth-century discourse of women and economies, Rappoport’s study should be required reading. She works through the complexities, without seeking totalizing theoretical answers, of real-world practice and narrative form and representation. Rappoport’s work itself traces an arc in the economic history of women throughout the period, bringing her readers from Austen and the Brontës in the early nineteenth century through to Dickens and Gaskell at mid-century, and then to George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and Trollope’s six-volume Palliser series (1865–80).

Reaching the later end of the Victorian era, Rappoport reads women, labour, and work in Margaret Oliphant’s Hester (1883). One—of many—examples of Rappoport’s careful work at the intersection of history, legislation, fiction, and economic theory is in her analysis of Hester. Women and wealth in Oliphant’s novel, Rappoport argues, ‘give us tools to revise [the] legacy’ of ‘denigrating rich women’ in fiction (p. 154). On this point, Rappoport considers Hester’s Catherine Vernon who, ‘like her titled namesake in Austen’s novel [Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Pride and Prejudice], appears to follow suit as one more clever, controlling, and unpleasant woman of property’ (p. 154). However, Hester’s Catherine ought to be registered within the context of the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act—also noting the earlier Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 and its amendment (1874). That is, essentially seventy years have passed between Austen’s rich Catherine and Oliphant’s. As such, Rappoport compellingly contends that Hester participates in the rescripting of women and property, including ‘replac[ing] the consolidation of wealth with women’s ability to maintain and protect separate property streams’ (p. 154). The trajectory of representing women as economic actors in their own right, which Rappoport so astutely traces, culminates in Oliphant’s novel, which offers ‘a wider range of women’s economic relationships and choices’ (p. 154). Nonetheless, in retaining her hold on complexity, Rappoport reminds her readers that ‘extralegal factors’ ‘persist’ in their ‘importance [when it comes to] women and property even after the reform of married women’s property law’ (p. 154).

3. ‘Speculative Time’: Futurity, Betting, and Market Prediction

Paul Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis is an excellent addition to this year’s work in economic criticism. Working broadly across many literary forms (including newspaper reporting, long-form journalism, novels, Supreme Court opinions, and more), Speculative Time breaks through ideological assumptions of gender, class, and race in the context of early twentieth-century stock market participation. In so doing, the study underscores the impact of speculation and futurity across social, economic, and racial strata. Crosthwaite’s corpus includes well-known and oft-studied texts such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). Crosthwaite’s purview, however, reaches quite beyond established texts of the field. For instance, his reading of William Gann’s The Tunnel Thru the Air (1927)—a novel whose protagonist sees an interconnectedness among prophecy, weather, and economic conditions—offers just one of many insightful economic-literary analyses. Two posthumously published novels, Claude McKay’s Amiable with Big Teeth (2017) and Richard Wright’s Lawd Today! (1963), model a rigorous approach to African American writing as it intersects with speculation, futurity, and economic agency. Speculative Time thus provides a nuanced and complex framework within which to read American literature, particularly as it is bound up with capitalism’s rhythmic tempo of boom-and-bust. Central, too, is the way in which Crosthwaite works with another kind of time—futurity—within diverse literary forms. The innovative aspects of this study make it required reading for any serious engagement with American literature and economic theory.

Speculative Time begins in the New Historicist mode, presenting a tightly focused anecdote from which the book’s broader argument unfolds. Crosthwaite starts with the ‘carefully wrought rhetorical performance’ of ‘Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in delivering the Court’s opinion in the case of Board of Trade of the City of Chicago v. Christie Grain and Stock Company’ (pp. 2, 1). Holmes’s opinion, in part, implicitly posits the banality of speculation: ‘“People will endeavor to forecast the future and to make agreements according to their prophecy. Speculation of this kind by competent men is the self-adjustments of society to the probable”’ (qtd. p. 1). These two sentences—constituting just a minor fragment of the whole—are imbricated with ideological commitments in terms of class, gender and race. Moreover, the opinion is, Crosthwaite argues, deceptively ‘straightforward’; its posture—that of being ‘commonsensical’—denies ‘the extraordinarily complex and varied implications and interpretations that attended […] economic speculation in the literature, and wider culture, of the United States in the first half of the twentieth century’ (p. 2). From here, Crosthwaite brings the same sharp eye to a range of American texts as he explicates ‘conceptual tensions, vexed cultural meanings, and ideological assumptions bound up with the theory and practice of speculation’ (p. 2).

William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930), a personal favourite of mine, garners Crosthwaite’s attention for its incredible deployment of time and its ‘timely’ origin: Faulkner’s diary entry for 25 October 1929 records his decision to write the book. Its timing, of course, is conspicuously contemporaneous with the Great Crash. Faulkner’s prose is not known for being scrutable, yet Crosthwaite works deftly with his mixed tenses and blurred boundaries of past-present-future. Or, in Crosthwaite’s words: ‘As I Lay Dying [has a] distinctive temporal mode, in which experience never quite coincides with stimulus, [and] the registration of events [is] always coming a fraction too late’ (p. 109). The novel’s famous flood scene is but one example of many in American literature of the period, as Crosthwaite contends, that represent economic disaster and panic, with ‘the narrative images of storm, downpour, and flood’ (p. 109).

As the analysis moves from broader literary devices into close reading, Faulkner’s temporal mode and diction receive an intricate accounting. As the Bundrens are crossing the river (carrying their mother’s casket) amidst a horrendous storm and flood, Jewel’s beloved horse is caught up in the febrile water, ‘“crashing on a succession of lunges”’ and ‘“mov[ing] unbelievably fast”’ (qtd. p. 98). The family mules, too, are thrashing in the water, ‘“breathing now with a deep groaning sound”’ and—here the verb tenses become mixed—‘“looking back once, their gaze sweeps across us with in their eyes a wild, sad, profound and despairing quality as though they had already seen in the thick water the shape of the disaster which they could not speak and we could not see”’. Astutely, Crosthwaite parses the sentence, noting the past perfect, ‘“had already seen”’ instead of what one would expect, namely, ‘they have already seen’ (pp. 111–12, italics original). Such ‘syntactical torsion’—a phrase in its own right that recommends Crosthwaite’s prose—is doing much work in terms of speculative time and futurity. It is as if, Crosthwaite argues, the mules are prescient; that they are capable of knowing impending danger when the Bundrens may not yet be. Even more notable is Crosthwaite’s assessment of Darl’s narration: ‘[H]ow can Darl simultaneously narrate the same event as if it is happening to him now and as if it happened to him in the past?’ (p. 112).

This rendering is but a short excerpt of a much longer, well-rounded and compelling reading of Faulkner’s novel, and I recommend reading Crosthwaite’s explication in full. Not only can this exposition enrich one’s understanding of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, but also it can be a model for bringing close-reading analyses to other texts engaging richly with metaphor, economic disaster, and time.

Furthering that sense of Crosthwaite’s incredible scope, his reading of prophecy, time, and economic speculation is well captured in his treatment of Gann’s The Tunnel Thru the Air. Gann’s novel brings together prophecy, biblical tropes, storm imagery, and superstition, thus highlighting these elements as throughlines in American literature of the 1920s and 1930s. As for biblical allusion, the novel features ‘invocations of Ezekiel, Isaiah, Jonah, John of Patmos’ and more (p. 26). The blending of biblical tropes and speculation takes on a telling intersection: the novel’s protagonist, Robert Gordon, develops a ‘system’ of ‘“rules for forecasting the future of stocks and commodities […] [and] rules foretelling the events in the history of the country”’ (pp. 20–21). For instance, Robert ‘predict[s] the Great Mississippi Flood’ (p. 20). Doing so ‘allowed speculators like Robert to profit by anticipating the higher prices that the surviving crops would command on the New York Cotton exchange’ (p. 21). Notably, as Crosthwaite points out, Robert also foresees that in ‘“1928 and 1930 to 1932 […] [there will be] famine, depressing business conditions, and panic, not only in Europe, but in the United States”’ (p. 20). For those grounded in the history of economic disaster and its linkage to the Second World War, Crosthwaite’s reading of The Tunnel Thru the Air would be essential reading.

It is worth zooming out more broadly to consider Speculative Times’ thick and strong reading of history. Two moments of in-depth historicity can rightly stand alone: first, Crosthwaite’s recounting of the Roaring Twenties, and second, the numbers and policy games prominent in the Black community in the same decade. As for the first, Crosthwaite recounts—in part through John Moody’s ‘The New Era in Wall Street’ (Atlantic Monthly [1928])—people’s general belief that the era of boom-and-bust cycles, which had become normalized from the 1850s onward, was over. Crosthwait points to Moody’s claims that America had entered a ‘“new era”’, one demarcated by ‘“a continuous feast of speculative profits”’ (p. 29). Many factors informed and shaped Moody’s assessment; as Crosthwaite notes, not only had the United States amassed ‘vast gold reserves […] during the Great War’ but also Henry Ford’s assembly line ‘held out the promise of productive gains at a rate never experienced’ before (pp. 29–30). Yet another strength of Crosthwaite’s historical overview is the inclusion of data, which speaks loudly: ‘on September 3, 1929, when the Dow closed at 381.17 points, [it] represented a gain of over 400 percent since 1921’ (p. 30). The work done here, in Chapter 1, ‘Speculation, Prediction, and the Great Crash of 1929’, situates the reader in a more presentist relationship with the Roaring Twenties—we are still close enough to the 2008–09 crash that we cannot help but read this history in proximity to our own.

The second moment of extremely deft historicism is in Chapter 6, ‘“Politics Was Something Like the Numbers Game”: Policy, Politics, and Speculation in Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison’. Here, Crosthwaite works against the grain of the Supreme Court opinions’ implicit biases regarding race and class (therefore underscoring Speculative Times’ wonderfully seamless structure). Before rendering compelling readings of McKay, Wright, and Ellison, Crosthwaite brings the African American community into relationship with the Roaring Twenties’ speculative mood. Noting the persistent assumption that Black communities were situated outside speculation, Crosthwaite offers a different account: while many African Americans may not have been caught up in stock market speculation per se, they were just as engaged with speculative behaviours and thinking. Notably, bets were placed in the context of participating in games (called ‘numbers games’ and ‘policy games’), which often mirrored or shadowed the stock market. Crosthwaite’s history demonstrates that there is ‘a long if tenuous history of efforts by African Americans to participate actively in the culture of financial speculation [that is] so central to the American mythos of individual success, security, and self-determination’ (p. 199). He observes, too, that not all activity was outside the formal market: ‘There is evidence of African American equities ownership stretching back to the beginning of the nineteenth century, with “records and folktales reveal[ing] emerging black professionals trying to master the rules of investing”’ (Bell, In the Black, qtd. p. 199).

There is much to recommend Speculative Time, and this review article is by necessity too short to give the text as detailed a summary as it deserves. The coda, ‘A Long Shadow’, is, as I have claimed of other sections of this text, necessary reading. Here, Crosthwaite takes a productive presentist turn, bringing to the fore questions of how moments of economic crisis can be followed by ‘resurgences of radical politics on both the right and left, a vicious backlash against immigrants and minorities, and new forms of resistance to structures of racial inequality and oppression’ (p. 261). As Crosthwaite remarks, while Speculative Time is thoroughly about a particular time and place—1920s and 1930s America—it also ‘offer[s] some reflections on what it means for texts written in this period [1920s–1930s] to be acclaimed as peculiarly “relevant,” “timely,” or even “prescient” almost a century after they were first published or performed’ (p. 261). Considering movements from Occupy Wall Street to Donald Trump populism, Crosthwaite does what all astute literary and cultural critics do: by reaching into a past time and place, he guides his readers’ eyes forward—not only to the present moment or recent past but also to the near future. I highly recommend this text to be placed on American literature and culture, or American studies, syllabi. It will also benefit those working in economic theory more broadly and those engaging critically with contemporary Anglo-American fiction.

Conclusion

This year’s work in economic criticism brings us many texts, some of which naturally fall beyond the scope of this review chapter. In addition to the works reviewed here, some recent publications that may be of interest to literary and cultural critics include Jacob Jensen’s The Marketizers: Public Choice and the Origins of the Neoliberal Order; Markus K. Brunnermeier and Ricardo Reis’s A Crash Course on Crises: Macroeconomic Concepts for Run-Ups, Collapses, and Recoveries; and John H. Cochrane’s The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level. Cochrane’s work may be beneficial for those interested in evaluating policy and outcomes, or policy and history, as they intersect with fiscal theory (see, in particular, Part I, ‘The Fiscal Theory’). Brunnermeier and Reises’ text may make a productive companion for Crosthwaite’s Speculative Time. Finally, Jensen’s The Marketizers would bring a critical, theoretical framework for critics working on Western literature and culture from 1945 onwards.

The multivalence of this year’s writing on economics is evidence of the continued import of economic theory for cultural and literary criticism. Even more importantly, the works reviewed here model the kind of work that could, and should, be generated in the near future. For instance, Marx for Cats offers the opportunity to explore posthumanist concerns as they may intersect with Marxist and other economic theories. While Marx for Cats homes in on (as its title promises to do) one economic theory and one nonhuman companionate species, La Berge’s gambit pays off: she charts important territory for emerging early twenty-first-century scholars to explore other ways to decentre homo economicus and consider economic structures’ impact on many subjects. As for women’s economic writing, as Dalley’s and Rappoport’s works attest, important recovery and archival work must continue; it is vital if ideologies and assumptions are to be, on an ongoing basis, identified and critically assessed—and broken through to a more generative present and future. Crosthwaite’s work furthers this sentiment, as Speculative Time brings to a conscious level many uncritical beliefs about race, class, and economic agency. I hope that this year’s review chapter is part of that process of pushing the boundaries of the field further, supporting academics in their efforts to recover lost archives, expand the kinds of economic theories we bring to our analyses, and—in so doing—shape early twenty-first-century scholarship responsively to emergent contexts.

Books Reviewed

References