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film and fiction
This page offers context by considering past booms, bubbles
and crashes in literature and film.
It covers -
introduction
We suspect that few visitors to this site will happily
immerse themselves in accounts of pre-1900 financial events,
although such analyses often offer more insights than
the more delirious prose from 1990s corporate hagiographers,
enthusiasts in Wired or cheerleaders in the National
Office for the Information Economy and its overseas counterparts.
(We would, of course, be delighted to hear that we are
wrong.)
One point of perspective on current and past economic
changes is literature - novels and pasquinades about things
going up ... and down.
the literature of exuberance
What accounts for novels, short stories and films about
financial giddiness?
The literature of exuberance is attributable to opportunities
for -
- depiction
of people under pressure, reversals of fortune, the
humbling of the proud and retribution for the wicked
or merely tension between 'old money' and the new rich
- vicarious
enjoyment of upmarket goodies, whether 1850s ormolu
and ortolans or 1990s Louis Vuiton and Patek-Philippe
- 'revelations',
substantive or otherwise, about the innate wickedness
of the agents of finance capital - brokers, bankers
and publicists - or merely people who live in cities
- reassurance
about the worthiness of the "grey and humdrum lives"
of most readers.
the novel of money
The 'novel of money' has attracted surprisingly little
scholarly attention. Points of entry include Colin Nicholson's
lucid Writing & the Rise of Finance: Capital Satires
of the Early Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge
Uni Press 1994), Borislav Knezevic's Figures of Finance
Capitalism: Writing, Class, and Capital in Mid-Victorian
Narratives (London: Routledge 2003) and Wayne Westbrook's
Wall Street in the American novel (New York:
New York Uni Press 1980). For excitement from 1890 to
1914 see David Zimmerman's Panic! Markets, Crises,
and Crowds in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: Uni
of North Carolina Press 2006) and Walter Taylor's classic
The Economic Novel in America (1942).
Classic accounts of pre-industrial bubbles include Daniel
Defoe's 1719 The Anatomy of Exchange-alley, 1721
The Case of Mr. Law and The Director, complementing
Jonathan Swift's 1721 The Bubble and 1704 A
Tale of a Tub, written for the universal improvement of
mankind. The 1727 satire Voyage to Cacklogallinia,
attributed to Captain Samuel Brunt, was for us more engaging
than A Conspiracy of Paper: a Novel (New York:
Random House 2000) by David Liss.
The UK railway mania features in Trollope's The Way
We Live Now, with a biting portrait of entrepreneur
Alfred Grant, complicit directors and gulled investors.
A few generations later Theodore Dreiser provided an ambivalent
account in The Financier (1912), with commodity
speculation covered in Frank Norris' The Pit: A Story
of Chicago (1903). Contemporary works included Frederic
Isham's Black Friday (1904), Upton Sinclair's
The Moneychangers (1908) and Thomas Lawson's
Friday, the Thirteenth (1906).
John Dos Passos' USA trilogy offered a more searching
account of the US boom than Fitzgerald's The Great
Gatsby. Plunger Jesse Livermore was fictionalised
in Edwin Lefevre's 1923 Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
more bang for your bucks?
Half a century on Margaret Drabble's The Ice Age
(1977) considered the London property bubble. For speculation
see in particular Christina Stead's superb The House
of All Nations (rpr Sydney: Angus & Robertson
1988).
Tensions between old - ie sanitised - money and the new
variety are captured in Wendy Wasserstein's Old Money
(2002) and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money (1987)
In the airport novel genre see in particular Paul Erdman's
1976 The Crash of 79 and 1986 The Panic of
89, Michael Thomas' The Ropespinner Conspiracy
(1987) and Someone Else's Money (1982), Tom Wolfe's
The Bonfire of the Vanities (1988), James Buchan's
High Latitudes, and Michael Ridpath's Trading
Reality (1997) and Free to Trade (1995).
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