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Learning finance through fiction: ‘Cecilia’ and the perils of credit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Joyce Goggin
Joyce Goggin*
Affiliation:
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
*
Corresponding author: Joyce Goggin, University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 19268, 1000 GG Amsterdam, Netherlands. Email: j.goggin@uva.nl
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Abstract

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This article discusses the rise of modern banking, the invention of credit and a related persistent orientation to the future inherent in credit-based economies, through the example of the novel which, as a literary form, came into being at roughly the same time. As a distinctly commercial genre and as a product of the financial revolution, novels ask readers to ‘credit’ the stories they tell with truthfulness, and to invest them with a particular form of credibility as significant narratives. At the same time, novels invite readers to imagine ‘as if’ scenarios and possible worlds in much the same way that borrowed capital enables people to construct life worlds based on resources not yet realised through investment in a speculative economy. Therefore, by examining how finance and gambling debts circulate in one particular text from the eighteenth century - Francis Burney's Cecilia - as a primary example of how credit and fictionalisation grew up together, this article argues that credit and risk feed into the narrative accounting and recounting of the text and articulate the affective structure of the financialised future that we have now inherited, and which informs how we understand ourselves as subjects, as well as how we interact with finance as a form of entertainment.

Keywords

Financefictiongamblingspeculationsubjectivityentertainment
Type
Article
Information
Finance and Society , Volume 1 , Issue 1: Hard cash , 2015 , pp. 61 - 74
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits noncommercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© 2015 The Author(s)

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