Paul Crosthwaite

Speculative Time: American Literature in an Age of Crisis examines how a climate of financial and economic speculation and disaster shaped the literary culture of the United States in the early to mid-twentieth century. It argues that speculation's risk-laden and crisis-prone temporalities had major impacts on writing in the period, as well as on important aspects of visual representation. The conceptions of time-and especially futurity-arising from the theory and practice of speculation provided crucial models for writers' and other artists' aesthetic, intellectual, and political concerns and strategies. The attractions and dangers of speculation were most spectacularly apparent in the period's pivotal economic event: the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The book offers an innovative account of how the speculative boom and bust of the "Roaring Twenties" affected literary and cultural production in the United States. It situates the stock market gyrations of the 1920s and 1930s within a wider culture of speculation that was profoundly shaped by, but extended well beyond, the brokerages and trading floors of Wall Street. The early to mid-twentieth century was a “speculative time,” an age characterized by leaps of economic, political, intellectual, and literary speculation; and the notion of speculative time provides a means of understanding the period's characteristic temporal modes and textures, as evident in work by figures including F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Nathan Asch, William Faulkner, Federico García Lorca, James N. Rosenberg, Margaret Bourke-White, Archibald MacLeish, Christina Stead, Claude McKay, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison.

Invested examines the perennial and nefarious appeal of financial advice manuals. Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening. Invested tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities.

Invested examines the perennial and nefarious appeal of financial advice manuals. Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening. Invested tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities.

In the twenty-first century, leading publishers are under intense pressure from their conglomerate owners and shareholders to generate growth and profits. This book shows how these pressures have transformed the contemporary novel. Paul Crosthwaite argues that recent British and American authors have internalized the market logics of the financial sector and book trade, resulting in the production of works of 'market metafiction' in which authors reflect obsessively on their writing's positioning in the literary marketplace. The Market Logics of Contemporary Fiction reveals the entanglement of fictional narrative and market dynamics to be the central phenomenon of contemporary literary culture. It engages with work by key authors including Iain Sinclair, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, Bret Easton Ellis, Chris Kraus, Percival Everett, David Foster Wallace, Colson Whitehead, Anne Billson, Hari Kunzru, Barbara Browning, Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Tao Lin, Nell Zink, Joshua Cohen, Sheila Heti, and Garth Risk Hallberg.