Fictions of Credit

The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major function of the American capitalist engine, presenting various formulations of American capitalism from the perspective of economists, social scientists, and literary critics.

In the early eighteenth century, the increasing dependence of society on financial credit provoked widespread anxiety. Texts of credit stock–certificates, IOUs, bills of exchange–were denominated as potential "fictions," while the potential fictionality of other texts was measured in terms of the "credit" they deserved.