Introduction

During the past two decades something called "economic criticism" has flourished. As a new generation of scholars has explored the cultural and social machinery of finance, commerce, political economy, and money, early American literary scholarship has forged its own distinctive and transformative body of criticism under this rubric. It is not hard to discern the surge of interest in economic topics in our field. In the last 15 years, scholars such as David S. Shields (Oracles of Empire), Philip Gould (Barbaric Traffic), Karen A. Weyler (Intricate Relations), Joseph Fichtelberg (Critical Fictions), Jennifer J. Baker (Securing the Commonwealth), and Eric Wertheimer (Underwriting) have examined the centrality of transatlantic commerce, the slave trade, paper money, debt, insurance, consumerism, and market fluctuations in the literature of early America. We present these essays in the hope that they might occasion a timely assessment of the promise that such scholarship holds for our field of study.

All economic criticism shares an interest in the intersection of literary and economic terms, tropes, and models. But describing this approach with any definitiveness is a difficult task, particularly because to call it "economic" is to use the term in sometimes radically different ways. Moreover, as Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen write in their groundbreaking collection, The New Economic Criticism, this literary-economic intersection has been viewed variously from different critical perspectives. Perhaps, then, it is best to trace out this criticism's genealogy and to name a set of techniques that have marked its practice.

Although economic topics have long been of interest to literary critics, poststructuralism, with its emphasis on the intratextual, intertextual, and extratextual relations that make language meaningful, has discernibly shaped economic criticism in the last three decades. This poststructuralist approach has been particularly concerned with monetary symbolism and, by implication, the analogies and homologies one might discern between money and language.¹ Most money, particularly its paper or electronic form, proclaims a face value that does not correspond exactly with its material value; hence, from a poststructuralist point of view, money, like language, is a symbol that can never fully close the gap between representation and reality. This analogy leads to others: crediting a piece of money, for example, requires a suspension of disbelief not unlike what a reader brings to imaginative literature.

Of course, money is just one instrument in an economy, and much economic criticism has focused less on monetary-linguistic symbolism and more generally on the relation between texts of a time period and a variety of contemporaneous economic discourses—be they about political economy, empire, property ownership, or class relations. No doubt influenced by the New Historicist turn of literary studies in the last two decades, recent scholars have trained their attention on the specific conditions that have shaped points of contact between literary and economic culture. Whereas poststructuralist economic criticism has tended to be theoretically inclined, comparativist, and broad in chronological scope, these historicist scholars have largely produced studies of periods and national literatures encompassing intellectual history, material culture, and post Marxist ideological criticism.² Most recently, studies of the history of the book have enriched historicist efforts to read economically. Although history of the book traces its roots to a different source—deriving as it has from earlier bibliographic scholarship—its attention to the production, sale, and circulation of texts, and to the remuneration of writers, has directed economic critics to new and productive topics for investigation.

Given the long-standing interdisciplinary ties between historians and literary scholars in our field, it should come as no surprise that the historicist mode of economic criticism is being brought to bear so productively on early American texts. Until recently, early Americanists perennially fought the idea that colonial and early national literature was aesthetically deficient and, turning the perception against itself, found history where artistry, form, and style "should have been." Early Americanists today are largely relieved of the burden of justifying their attention to this writing, but they are nevertheless fortunate to build upon this rich tradition of historically attentive criticism. One might also say that early Americanists have been primed for this scholarship insofar as they are...