Victorian Fiction and Finance
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Abstract
In this chapter, I argue that integrating the rise of finance into Victorian literature courses allows students to recognize how literature captures abstract historical and economic shifts at the level of human experience, and to reflect critically on the literature using their own experiences with the modern credit economy. By discussing novels explicitly or implicitly engaged with the Victorian credit economy, I explore how connecting Victorian experiences of financialization to their effects in everyday life—from how people lived and worked to the ways in which rationalization and calculation affected their understanding of their social world—makes finance a crucial topic in the literature classroom.
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© The Author(s) 2017