Fiction and Economy

This is a collection of new essays by European and British scholars on the intersections between fiction and economy.

This volume brings together new essays on the relations between fiction and the economy by eleven academics, all established or emergent scholars from different fields of expertise. The essays range widely in their respective foci, extending beyond purely literary studies to encompass history, the history of language, studies in the visual arts, and philosophy. Including essays from leading (and in some cases multilingual) academics in Europe as well as the UK, Fiction and Economy is genuinely international, distinctive, and broad in its scope.

SUSAN BRUCE is Senior Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. She has taught at the universities of Florence, Geneva and St Andrews, and is the editor of Three Early Modern Utopias (1997) and Shakespeare: King Lear (1997).
VALERIA WAGNER is maître d’enseignement et recherche at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she teaches in the Hispanic Studies and Comparative Literature programmes. Her publications include Literatura y vida cotidiana. Ficción e imaginario en las Américas (2005) and Bound to Act: Models of Action, Dramas of Inaction (1999).

Acknowledgements * Notes on Contributors * Introduction: Fiction and Economy–S.Bruce & V.Wagner * Supreme Fictions: Money and Words as Commodifying Signifiers–R.Waswo * Trafficking Words–M.Bridges * The Stain of the Signature–P.de Bolla * Semiotics and Economics–G.Colaizzi & J.Talens * ‘Parties in Converse’: Literary and Economic Dialogue in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet–M.Thornton Burnett * The Fabric of Society: Money, Cloth and Symbolic Exchanges in Njal’s Saga–F.L.Michelet * ‘There’s none/ Can truly say he gives, if he receives’: Timon of Athens and the Possibilities of Generosity, or, The Gift of a Stranger–S.Bruce * Spend, Spend, Spend: Expenditure and Waste in Hegel, Bataille, Derrida–R.Sellars * Towards a General Economics of Cinema–B.Bennett * Index