Mitch on Poovey, _Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (January 2009)

Mary Poovey, _Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in 
Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain_. Chicago: University of 
Chicago Press, 2008.  x + 511 pp. $59 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-226-67532-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by David Mitch, Department of Economics, University 
of Maryland –- Baltimore County.


In recent decades, literary critics have generated a body of scholarship 
that they have come to label the New Economic Criticism. This body of 
work defies ready summary but suffice it to say that it represents the 
interest of literary critics in economic literature and matters economic 
from a variety of perspectives. It has become sufficiently extensive to 
be the subject of the edited volume by Woodmansee and Osteen (1999). New 
economic critics are publishing book length studies with major academic 
presses, hold important chairs in university literature departments 
(e.g. Marc Shell at Harvard, Catherine Gallagher at Berkeley), and are 
producing new generations of literature doctorates.  Mary Poovey (Samuel 
Rudin Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English, New York 
University) is one of the leading new economic critics and her latest 
work _Genres of the Credit Economy_ can be seen as a contribution to 
this field and certainly draws heavily on it; on pages 10-14 she 
provides her own distinctive overview of this field of literary criticism.

Poovey’s book itself is an exercise in what could be called genre 
analysis and it is both apt and ironic as she herself notes on p. 14 
that her latest work further confirms her own originality in producing 
new intellectual genres. This ability is already on display in one of 
her earlier books, _A History of the Modern Fact_ (1998), which can be 
described as a history of epistemology in work on economic and social 
affairs. That book put forward the plausible, albeit provocative, claim 
that by the first half of the nineteenth century, writers on economic 
and social affairs had come to emphasize quantitative measures regarded 
as objective facts as the foundation of knowledge and policy discussion 
in contrast with a previous skepticism of such facts.  The social 
constructionist perspective evident in her 1998 book is amply on display 
in her latest effort.  To my mind, she is fundamentally correct in the 
underlying premises both of her earlier book and of her new one. _A 
History of the Modern Fact_ presumes that “quantitative objective facts” 
in actuality entail considerable amounts of political and social 
interpretation (e.g. election vote counts, census population totals, 
national income measures, cost of living and poverty indexes). Her 
latest book presumes that the functioning of a modern credit economy 
fundamentally entails elements of trust. I suspect that one could 
readily find widespread agreement with both premises with the latter in 
particular being perhaps self-evident. However, in the case of her 
earlier book there are issues to be raised regarding her chronology of 
changing cultural attitudes towards quantification in social affairs, 
her degree of mastery of vast bodies of both contemporaneous literature 
and more recent historiography, and the extent to which the changes in 
epistemological cultural attitudes she maps out are primarily 
relativistic or have entailed genuine social progress. For a quite 
skeptical take on Poovey’s earlier book by a leading historian of 
science see Margaret Jacob’s essay in _History and Theory_ (2001).

¬_Genres of the Credit Economy_ states in its opening sentences that it 
tries to address two questions that arise from Poovey’s earlier book: 
“If the kind of knowledge that contemporary society values is really the 
modern fact, then why does the discipline of Literary studies matter? 
What can Literary scholars do?” (p. 1). As Poovey explains in a footnote 
to this passage, these dilemmas arise insofar as prioritizing facts 
tends to devalue the activity of interpretation, the activity that would 
seem the focus of Literary studies.  Although Poovey at points (p. 14) 
labels her latest book as a history, its chronological development is 
less linear than in her previous _History of the Modern Fact_.  Her 
latest book alternates between tracing general intellectual trends and 
fine-grained textual analysis of specific works; she jumps back and 
forth in time in her consideration of various genres. After setting 
forth her general thesis that imaginative, economic, and monetary forms 
all emerged as distinctive genres in response to the rise of a credit 
economy, the core of Poovey’s text consists of detailed readings 
concentrating on modes of argumentation, organization, and style in 
selected works of economic and imaginative literature written in Britain 
between 1650 and 1870.

Poovey acknowledges that other intellectual genres that she does not 
consider were involved in the modern differentiation of economics and 
literary criticism; she points in particular to natural philosophy (p. 
5). However, she notes “a conviction that many contemporary scholars 
share -- that economics and Literary studies have some special 
relationship to each other.”  She goes on to argue that the two fields 
should be studied together because of a common concern with what 
literary critics term the problematic of representation. Poovey defines 
the problematic of representation as “one way scholars describe the gap 
that separates the sign from its referrant or ground (of value or 
meaning), whether the gap takes the form of deferral, substitution, 
obscurity” (p.5).   It is perhaps apparent why the relation between sign 
and referrant should be an on-going concern of literary scholars; 
however, she argues that financial crises have also brought this problem 
to the fore in the fields of economics and finance and that it is useful 
to consider the parallel treatments of this problem in the cases of the 
two disciplines. She also takes note of the frequent employment of 
financial themes by nineteenth century British novelists.

Another term sometimes used by literary critics also recurs throughout 
her discussion:  naturalized (or alternatively naturalization). By 
naturalization Poovey means a process by which behaviors which are 
initially new and strange and hence subject to suspicion and scrutiny 
become customary and taken for granted. She emphasizes its importance 
for the use of new types of monetary instruments in a credit economy: 
“money has been _naturalized_: through the social process that I 
describe in this book, money has become so familiar that its writing has 
seemed to disappear and it has seemed to lose its history as (various 
forms of) writing” (p.3). To highlight the significance she attaches to 
these two terms, she introduces each of them by placing them in italics 
in the text (pp. 3, 5).  And one of Poovey’s central claims is that both 
naturalization and the problematic of representation were central to 
functioning of money in the rise of the modern credit economy.

In a preamble, she describes the emergence of imaginative literature, 
financial writing, and monetary instruments as distinctive written 
genres over the course of the eighteenth century in Britain.  She argues 
that all three genres developed as ways of “naturalizing” the use of 
money and hence of dealing with the problematic of representation 
inherent in monetary instruments: that such instruments frequently only 
symbolize some underlying item of value without guaranteeing access to 
the item itself.

The first two self-identified chapters of the book consider writing 
about money in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first 
chapter takes up the attention given by contemporaries between the late 
seventeenth and early nineteenth century to the problematic of 
representation inherent in money. She backs into this through looking at 
J.R. McCullough’s collection of pamphlets dealing with money. She gives 
particular attention to Joseph Harris’ “An Essay upon Money and Coins” 
published in 1757-58, in which he challenges the ideas that either the 
imprint on a coin’s face or its metallic content is its source of value. 
Then after quickly touching on Locke’s views on the nature of money, she 
fast-forwards to debates in the early nineteenth century involving 
Ricardo, McCullough, and Macaulay among others on the desirability of 
convertibility between coins, paper money, and bank notes. In the last 
section of the chapter, Poovey offers the intriguing suggestion that 
writing regarding money in the eighteenth century frequently blurred the 
distinction between fact and fiction and she identifies a fact/fiction 
continuum in this regard.  The second chapter looks at episodes in what 
she identifies as generic differentiation of treatments of Money. She 
notes that Defoe’s work frequently blurred fact/fiction distinctions and 
in particular focuses on a manuscript of his since labeled _Roxanne_. 
Poovey argues that it was later editors who classified this work as 
fiction; she suggests that one of Defoe’s aims in this text was the 
non-fictional one of explaining the workings of credit. One example of 
the insights her literary background provides is her observation (p. 98) 
that Defoe employed the classical oral rhetorical device of elaboration, 
i.e. offering long lists in order to engage listeners in an imaginative 
flight, in written form, with a similar aim of engaging the reader’s 
imagination.  She turns to parallels between James Steuart’s work on 
Political Economy and Fielding’s novel _Tom Jones_, noting similarities 
in the treatment of personal character in each. She then notes Adam 
Smith’s more abstract mode of argumentation in contrast with Steuart’s 
more fictionalized narrative. The chapter concludes with observations on 
the blend of fact and fiction in Thomas Bridges’ _Adventures of a 
Bank-Note_ (1770-71), a work based on depicting the perspective on 
passing surroundings a bank note might have as it made its way from 
holder to holder, including intervals when tucked in a woman’s bosom (p. 
149).

A first “interchapter” then takes up the rise of book publishing and of 
the issuance of bank commercial paper. This really constitutes her brief 
notes on matters that are pertinent to issues elsewhere in the book; as 
she notes herself, these issues have been taken up in much greater depth 
by other authors; indeed each of these topics deserves and has been 
given book length treatment by others and I did not find the 17 pages 
she devotes to them sufficient to add much further insight to this other 
work.

Chapters three and four take up the emergence of economic writing as a 
distinctive set of genres in the early nineteenth century. Chapter three 
takes note of increasing skepticism about the workings of the growing 
credit economy. It examines publications by critics of paper money such 
as William Cobbett and John Francis Bray. Chapter four takes up the 
differentiation of writing on economic theory from financial journalism. 
After giving relatively brief attention to David Ricardo’s employment of 
abstraction in his theoretical work, she focuses at some length on J.R. 
McCullough as a writer engaged in both economic theory and journalism. 
She then turns to Walter Bagehot’s and D. Morier Evans’ emergence as 
specialized economic journalists while attributing to William Stanley 
Jevons the effort to define economics as a narrow specialist science, 
giving particular attention to his interest in developing a sun spot 
theory of the business cycle. Poovey’s general argument in this chapter 
is that economic journalism and abstract economic theory became 
increasingly differentiated in the early to mid nineteenth century as 
part of a social process of naturalizing credit instruments. Economic 
journalists such as Bagehot and Evans instilled familiarity with the 
financial system and depicted the occasional crash or panic as an 
aberration from normal stability. At the same time the emergence of 
abstract economic science as practiced by Jevons with his work on 
sunspot theory -- precisely because it employed arcane, mysterious 
techniques apparently at variance with observable reality -- in Poovey’s 
view helped establish an expertise which could testify to the value of 
bank money. This authority provided a way of dispelling doubts about 
credit instruments implied by the problematic of representation.

Chapter Five then turns to literary authors and suggests that Wordsworth 
and Coleridge were keen to separate aesthetic from commercial value in 
literature. Poovey suggests that their concerns were motivated by the 
growth in demand for cheap popular publications. In a second 
interchapter, Poovey notes that recent work by literary critics on 
Harriet Martineau employs formal aesthetic criteria of organic unity in 
evaluating Martineau’s work though claiming to deviate from literary 
formalism. She then proposes an alternative approach to interpretation 
she labels “historical description” as a means of engaging with texts 
while placing them in a larger historical narrative. She illustrates her 
approach in Chapter Six which offers meticulous readings of novels by 
Austen, Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope focusing on passages in which 
financial matters come to the fore. Her arguments include the audacious 
economic determinist claim that Jane Austen’s _Pride and Prejudice_ was 
in large degree a response to the Bank Restriction Act of 1797: the 
breach of promise to redeem bank notes with gold explicit in the Bank 
Restriction Act according to Poovey motivated Austen’s interest in 
portraying Elizabeth Bennett’s concern about her potential broken 
promise to thank Mr. Darcy.

The book concludes with a four page “Coda” in which Poovey bemoans both 
the low current prestige of literary studies in comparison with that of 
economics in modern American and British universities and the divide 
that has arisen between the two disciplines.

Recent economic events would seem to make it abundantly evident that the 
modern economy is a credit economy and that loss of confidence in credit 
instruments and their underlying connection to value can wreak economic 
havoc.  Thus, Poovey’s theme is certainly timely. The book itself raises 
numerous stimulating questions and surveys a wealth of literature both 
past and more contemporary with which I, for one, was not previously 
familiar.

One general issue of evaluation posed by her book is that implied by the 
questions she poses in her introduction -- namely whether a 
post-modernist literary critic can bring any useful tools to bear in 
understanding the history of economics, economic history or modern 
economics.  Quite possibly, new economic critics, including Poovey, are 
aiming their work primarily at fellow literary critics; but as Poovey 
herself wonders in the passage cited above from her introduction, should 
those outside of this guild take the burgeoning body of work by new 
economic critics seriously?

Difficulties are certainly evident with the scope of Poovey’s book. 
While the range of her reading is impressive both in contemporary 
sources and in the more recent historiography both of social scientists 
and literary critics, there are notable omissions in her surveys of 
relevant literature. Moreover, at points she openly acknowledges not 
having completed her scholarly homework and assumes an alarmingly 
nonchalant attitude about not having done so. These issues surface when 
at points she fails to distinguish or at least elides the fields of 
economic history and the history of economic thought.  This shows up in 
a particularly egregious manner in her introduction (pp. 9-10) in which 
she admits her inability to trace out the relationship between the 
modern discipline of economics and its nineteenth century precursors and 
blames this on the lack of interest of modern economists in the history 
of their discipline. She then states (p. 10), “I can only hope that some 
day an economic historian will write a version of this history from the 
other side so that Literary scholars like myself can see how this 
discipline’s present informs the way we understand its past.” I presume 
that she means “historian of economics” rather than “economic historian” 
in this passage.  Poovey clearly has done some reading in the history of 
economics and indeed even cites such standard works as Schumpeter’s 
_History of Economic Analysis_.  I am not clear on what are the 
requirements for Poovey’s desired “history from the other side” or why 
Schumpeter’s work or Mark Blaug’s less compendious _Economic Theory in 
Retrospect_ or the Warren Samuels, Jeff Biddle, and John Davis edited 
_Companion to the History of Economic Thought_ would not suffice.  It 
would seem that Poovey simply ran out of energy in trying to master the 
history of economics as well as modern economics. So why undertake to 
write the parallel histories of economics and literary criticism from a 
modern perspective unless one is prepared to take on the admittedly 
formidable task of reading reasonably deeply in the comparison 
discipline as well as one’s own discipline? Later (p. 94) she claims 
that “economic historians rarely consider Defoe’s writing at any 
length.” However, the works she cites to illustrate this are all 
histories of economics. No mention is made of early modern economic 
historian Peter Earle’s book entitled _The World of Defoe_.

Given Poovey’s focus on the rise of the credit economy, a particularly 
glaring omission from her bibliography is Anne Goldgar’s _Tulipmania_ 
(2007), which provides particularly rich documentation of the 
psychological reactions and issues of trust and betrayal associated with 
the mid-seventeenth century Dutch tulip bubble. Perhaps Goldgar’s book 
came out too late for Poovey to incorporate it in her own analysis.  In 
her discussion of the problem of monetary shortage no mention is made of 
the important study by Thomas Sargent and Francois Velde, _The Big 
Problem of Small Change_ (Princeton, 2002).

Central parts of Poovey’s argument are often based on a complex and 
extensive secondary literature. While she does have her own distinctive 
take or twist in most of these instances, she frequently does not 
succeed in the space she has allotted in convincingly expounding the 
arguments and evidence in question. For example, her claim that money is 
simply one form of written literary genre comes across as a bit 
contrived in the 25 pages she devotes to it in comparison with Deborah 
Valenze’s book length study, _The Social Life of Money in the English 
Past_ or Carl Wennerlind’s article “Money Talks but What Is It Saying? 
Semiotics of Money and Social Control.”   Poovey (p. 59) does 
acknowledge and cite extensively from Valenze’s work while arguing for 
her own greater emphasis on the role of other written genres in 
naturalizing money as a genre.

I found the organization and coverage of Poovey’s book rather fragmented 
and indeed cubist in nature; by cubist, I mean offering shifting 
perspectives on a given object rather than a cohesive, continuous 
overview. This may in large part reflect her unabashed use of the tools 
of literary criticism. Rather than attempting any sort of comprehensive 
or connected overview, Poovey picks and chooses particular works for 
intensive analysis. While her choices are intriguing, they also seem 
idiosyncratic.  I was unaware before reading Poovey’s book of Thomas 
Bridges’ _Adventures of a Bank Note_; and its premise of a banknote’s 
eye view of the world is interesting. However, it is less evident to me 
that this work is central to understanding eighteenth century literature 
on finance.

Although _Genres of the Credit Economy_ considers examples of how the 
fields of economics and literary criticism treat the problematic of 
representation, at the end of the day it doesn’t really develop the 
comparisons and contrasts between them.  This, in part, stems from the 
book’s cubist organization as it jumps back and forth between time 
periods and subject areas and genres without offering a developed 
concluding chapter that pulls together her take on how writing on 
finance and economics has dealt with the problematic of representation 
inherent in financial markets in comparison with how literary studies 
have done so.

Poovey’s book itself has the phrase “mediating value” in its subtitle; 
at points she does take up the contrast between market value and 
aesthetic value.  And she does note issues regarding the influence of 
market criteria on aesthetic values raised both by nineteenth century 
authors and subsequent critics; both groups of writers essentially 
employed aesthetic values to assess the workings of the market. Yet she 
does not consider work by economists that discuss the engagement between 
the market and the aesthetic, both using the market to evaluate 
aesthetics and the use of aesthetics to evaluate the market. Thus no 
mention is made of the work of David Galenson, among others, that uses 
art auction prices as a means of assessing relative artistic or 
aesthetic merit or the work of Tyler Cowen that argues that market 
forces of competition lead to cultural richness and diversity rather 
than bland homogeneity, as is commonly alleged. Nor does she consider 
arguments by Cowen (2008) regarding how literary works can provide 
fodder for developing economic models, nor Frank Knight’s claim that 
“economics is a branch of aesthetics and ethics to a larger degree than 
of mechanics” (1935, p. 97) -- and she only briefly touches on the work 
by McCloskey regarding rhetorical forms in economic argument.

Poovey’s choice of end point for her study in the 1870s would seem to 
derive from her focus on the relationship between the problematic of 
representation and the rise of the credit economy. She argues that by 
the 1870s the field of economic theory had become differentiated from 
financial journalism. Both endeavors in her view served to naturalize 
how the credit economy deals with the problematic of representation -- 
financial journalism by providing familiarity and economic theory by 
providing the authority of the technical expert. In the meantime, 
imaginative writing and literary criticism had begun to develop its own 
distinctive approach to the problematic of representation through 
emphasizing elite aesthetic values over popular taste in literature.

However, by abruptly ending her account of disciplinary differentiation 
in the 1870s, it seems to me that Poovey forestalls consideration of 
important aspects of both continuity and change central to understanding 
evolving contrasts and relationships between the economic and literary 
fields of endeavor.  One literary genre that has been persistently used 
by economists and writers on economics over the centuries as a means of 
reaching general audiences is the parable and its kindred, the fable and 
the allegory. She does give some mention to Daniel Defoe’s and Harriet 
Martineau’s use of the parable. Yet the continuity of this tradition 
would seem worthy of further consideration. She makes no mention of 
Mandeville’s _Fable of the Bees_ (though she does give brief attention 
to Mandeville in _History of the Modern Fact_). And after taking up 
Martineau in the second interchapter, Poovey drops further consideration 
of this genre. But notable nineteenth century practitioners include 
Frederic Bastiat in France and more recently in the U.S. Paul Heyne and 
Russell Roberts, as well as the pseudo-nominal Angus Black and Marshall 
Jevons among others.  (Richard Stern, the novelist, was invited to 
review Marshall Jevons’ _Fatal Equilibrium_ for the _Journal of 
Political Economy_ under George Stigler’s editorship and Stern did not 
give it very high literary marks.) Perhaps Poovey’s focus on the 
financial sector accounts for her decision to treat this genre only 
briefly. However, Hugh Rockoff’s article on the _Wizard of Oz_ as a 
monetary allegory and subsequent literature (Hansen 2002; Dighe 2002) 
suggests scope for literary critics to consider the persistence of this 
genre even with a narrower focus on financial and monetary matters.

The employment of the genres of the parable, fable, and allegory in 
economic writing raises the more general question of whether an 
examination of the relationship between economics and literature should 
focus on how each field has engaged with ethics, the nature of human 
happiness, politics, and social policy. It can be argued that increasing 
concerns to establish economics as a science, with strong empirical and 
formal foundations -- i.e., to distinguish economics from political 
economy on the one hand and to emphasize the importance of aesthetic, 
conceptual and formalistic concerns in the study of literature on the 
other -- have displaced or at least obscured an underlying concern with 
ethics and human well-being common to both economics and literary 
studies. These are issues of long standing pedigree (see for example the 
work of Frank Knight, Lionel Robbins, Matthew Arnold, Chris Baldick, 
Wayne Booth, and Deirdre McCloskey). While this theme is not given much 
consideration in Poovey’s book, it is a central focus in the book by 
Poovey’s student, Claudia Klaver, _A/Moral Economics_.  However, many of 
the key developments in this regard in both disciplines seem to me to 
have occurred in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century as 
each became increasingly centered in academic institutions. Despite 
Poovey’s claim that it is common concern with the problematic of 
representation that leads to an inherent affinity between economics and 
literature, one might well think that the underlying architectonic 
discipline is ethics rather than economics or literary criticism despite 
intellectual imperialistic tendencies of each of these latter two 
disciplines. But Poovey’s 1870 cutoff for her study would seem to 
preclude examination of this issue.

Poovey’s take on the differentiation of economics and literary studies 
does allow for both external, societal influences and internal 
disciplinary considerations in both fields. However, it seems to me that 
she does put more emphasis on external social influences in the cases of 
economics and financial journalism than literary studies, casting 
British economists and financial journalists as running-dog lackey 
apologists for an emerging credit economy. One danger of genre analysis 
is that genres themselves become reifications based on overly rigid 
boundaries between fields of intellectual endeavor. One central issue 
she poses is the degree of specialization which has occurred not only 
between such broad spheres of endeavor as writing on economic affairs 
and imaginative literature but also within such spheres. One of the 
chief merits of Poovey’s study is bringing into play a rich array of 
ephemeral and journalistic publications in conjunction with more 
enduring classics of economic theory.  Poovey’s underlying premise is 
the common presumption of the inevitability of increasing intellectual 
specialization. In her account, eighteenth century writers such as Defoe 
and Smith covered a broad range of topics even within a given work -- 
with Defoe in particular blurring the fact and fiction distinction in 
his coverage of financial affairs. Then in the early nineteenth century, 
in her view, work on economic theory came to be distinguished from 
writing aimed at popular audiences, in turn distinguished from coverage 
offered by financial journalists. Similarly, literary writers were 
increasingly concerned to emphasize the importance of distinctive 
aesthetic imperatives from those of the market for popular literature. 
In her concluding “Coda,” she suggests that in the early twenty-first 
century, it is unusual for academic economists to produce work aimed at 
a general audience, citing in a footnote Steven Levitt’s _Freakonomics_ 
and Robert Shiller’s _Irrational Exuberance_ as exceptions, while it is 
even rarer in her reckoning for literary critics to write for general 
audiences.

However, taking the case of economics, it is of interest to consider 
longer term trends in the extent to which prominent economists have 
continued to cross the borders or even simultaneously engage in not only 
academic work on economics but also economic policy making, business 
endeavors, and writing aimed at student and general audiences, even if 
economists in general are not necessarily renaissance people.  One can 
begin with the case of David Ricardo, who at various points in his 
career engaged in stock broking and service in Parliament as well as 
writing on economics. If Ricardo’s writing on economics was in some 
sense more intellectually specialized than Adam Smith’s, he was far more 
engaged than Smith in business and political endeavors.  And although 
Poovey depicts William Stanley Jevons as emblematic of the narrowing of 
economics into a largely theoretical, mathematical, and 
university-centered discipline,  she considers only his work on marginal 
utility and sun spot theory.  She makes no mention of Jevons’ 
influential policy-oriented publications including _Methods of Social 
Reform_, _The State in Relation to Labour_, and _The Coal Question_. And 
there is certainly a long line forward of  prominent academic economists 
who have been active in policy circles as well as producing introductory 
  textbooks and other literature aimed at general audiences such as 
Alfred Marshall, John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, and Milton 
Friedman. Currently Ben Bernanke’s introductory economics textbook is 
still in print and coming out in new editions while he serves as Federal 
Reserve chairman following his quite successful academic career at 
Princeton and another Princeton academic, Paul Krugman, the latest Nobel 
laureate in economics, is also an introductory textbook author, _New 
York Times_ columnist, and television talking head -- to name just a 
couple of many possible current examples. And academic economists have 
also pursued financial ventures, as the notorious 1997 episode of 
Nobel-laureates Robert C. Merton’s and Myron Scholes’ involvement in the 
Long-term Capital Management debacle illustrate. In other words, the 
increasing specialization of texts by genre does not necessarily reflect 
a corresponding specialization of the authors who write them. In the 
case of economics, one could explain some of this by the extensive 
market both for textbooks and popular economic commentary in contrast 
with, say, fine imaginative literature. Publishers, perhaps, have much 
stronger economic incentives to induce leading economists to produce 
introductory textbooks and work aimed at popular audiences than to do 
the same for literary critics.  Books by Jacques Derrida, Michel 
Foucault, or Stanley Fish may not have the sales potential of those by 
Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman.  But this still leaves the ongoing 
pattern of those who have pursued successful careers in both academic 
economics and economic policy-making from John Maynard Keynes to 
Lawrence Summers.

A parallel issue unexplored by Poovey and presumably occurring after her 
end period of the 1870s is the apparent increasing separation between 
those who write imaginative literature and those who produce criticism 
of it. The examples of literary criticism she cites in chapters 5 and 6 
are primarily by those also engaged in imaginative writing such as 
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Trollope. This raises the question of whether 
the divide between those who write imaginative literature and those who 
produce literary criticism has become wider than the gap between those 
who write on economic theory, those who craft economic policy, those who 
write economic journalism, and those who engage in financial affairs. 
And if this is the case, what accounts for the greater degree of 
specialization by those engaging in literary studies than in economic 
studies?  Have the underlying ethical commitments of economists to 
social well being been stronger than those of more ivory tower literary 
critics?  Although Poovey does not explore these issues, her mode of 
genre analysis should at least be credited for giving rise to them.

Poovey mentions J.R.McCullough’s activity as a book and pamphlet 
collector but omits consideration of those in subsequent generations who 
engaged in this activity. Some might infer that an increasingly 
analytical mind set resulted in the extinction of the economist 
bibliophile, although Poovey herself does not explicitly state this. 
However, W.S. Jevons, who in the eyes of literary scholars such as 
Claudia Klaver and Poovey had quite narrow analytical interests, in fact 
appears to have been a quite keen economics bibliophile. By Keynes’ 
account, Jevons transmitted this bug onto the famed economics book 
collector and Cambridge economist, Herbert Foxwell. And Keynes himself 
was an avid antiquarian book collector (Keynes, _Essays in Biography_; 
Harrod, _Life of Keynes_).  The importance of the book and pamphlet 
collector for establishing the dimensions of various intellectual realms 
and genres may warrant further consideration. Foxwell’s collections 
formed the basis for both the Goldsmith’s and Kress libraries and these 
collections have now entered electronically searchable cyberspace as the 
_Making of the Modern World_ database. Keynes thought highly enough of 
Foxwell’s contributions to economic science as to pen a 23-page obituary 
for the _Economic Journal_ on Foxwell’s demise in 1936.

Despite the limitations that I think are evident in Poovey’s book, the 
genre perspective she offers is worthwhile for pointing to alternative 
intellectual boundaries and for posing questions that may not readily 
occur to those working within the disciplines she considers.  She 
usefully brings into play a rich array of contemporary and ephemeral 
literature bearing on economic and financial matters. And her notion of 
the fact-fiction continuum raises interesting issues about alternative 
relationships between evidence and theory. The new economic criticism 
more generally can be seen as providing economists and more specifically 
historians of economics and economic historians a means of addressing 
what could be called the Robert Burns problem: seeing ourselves as 
others see us.  My own impression is that while historians of economics 
and economic historians have not totally ignored the new economic 
criticism, they have hardly embraced it with enthusiasm. Offsetting any 
inclination to welcome those with an interest in one’s own subject 
matter, are likely primordial instincts to defend professional turf 
boundaries and claims of scholarly expertise. Furthermore, I suspect 
that much of the new economic criticism is grounded in an ideological 
outlook that some historians of economics would perceive as uncongenial. 
Thus Poovey in her concluding Coda (p. 419) refers to “the longing for 
an alternative to the market model.”  The extent and complexity of this 
body of work is a further reason for outsiders to neglect it; the new 
economic criticism, at least from this reviewer’s limited experience, is 
not an easy read yet there seems lots of it to process before one can 
claim to have much sense of it. Nevertheless, the new economic criticism 
probably does deserve further attention by historians of economics and 
economic historians. As Robert Burns reminds, seeing ourselves as others 
see us can free us from many a blunder and foolish notion as we become 
more aware of the louses crawling on our own bonnets.

References:

Matthew Arnold (1869), _Culture and Anarchy_.

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David Mitch is Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, Baltimore 
County (email: mitch at umbc.edu). He is the author of “Market Forces and 
Market Failure in Antebellum American Education: A Commentary” _Social 
Science History_ (Spring, 2008). He is currently revising an essay on 
“Chicago and Economic History” for the forthcoming _Elgar Companion to 
the Chicago School of Economics_ and is also working on high stakes 
educational testing in Victorian England.

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