Genres of the credit economy: mediating value in eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain

Genres of the Credit Economy mounts an ambitious and sophisticated argument about the effects of the increasing disciplinary specialization in literary studies and economics which set in over the period 1750–1900, and which the author suggests is responsible for a current impasse in ‘the discussions about value we so desperately need to restart’ (p. 418). Given the book’s date of publication early in 2008, this represents a remarkably prescient identification of the cultural importance of problems surrounding the definition of value which the credit crunch has brought to general attention. The book’s conclusion, however, that ‘imaginative writing’ (p. 418) should be central to renewed public debate about the nature of value, echoes Arnoldian and Romantic claims for poetry as an antidote to utilitarian conceptions of value in a way that seems strangely at odds with its own arguably neoconservative emphasis on the parallels between socio-literary processes which stabilize monetary value and those which consolidate cultural values.