Fiction, Finance, and Eliza Wharton's "Awful Futurity" in Early America

This essay identifies how the sentimental novel in the U.S., from early seduction tales to its realist apotheosis at the end of the nineteenth century, articulates a worldview essential for modern commerce. Whereas British literary studies has pursued linkages between the novel and financial discourse, surprisingly few Americanist studies extend this historiography of the novel. Seeking to redress this gap in the literature, this essay reads canonical novels like The Coquette and The House of Mirth alongside the political economy of Alexander Hamilton, Judith Sargent Murray, and Thorstein Veblen to track the novel's complex relation to financialization across the nineteenth century; doing so, I argue, brings forth new financial dimensions to the novel, exposing, in particular, the at times overlapping, at times diverging temporalities of both finance and fiction.