Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994

by Patrick Brantlinger

In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present. He draws on literary texts ranging from Augustan satire such as Gulliver's Travels to postmodern satire such as Martin Amis's A Suicide Note . All critique the misrecognition of public credit as wealth. The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money. Brantlinger traces the emergence of modern, imperial Great Britain from those foundations. He analyzes the process whereby nationalism, both the cause and the result of wars and imperial expansion, multiplied national debt and produced crises of public credit resolved only through more nationalism and war. During the first half of the eighteenth century, conservatives attacked public credit as fetishistic and characterized national debt as alchemical. From the 1850s, the stabilizing theories of public credit authored by David Hume, Adam Smith, Henry Thornton, and others, helped initiate the first "social science" economics. In the nineteenth century, literary criticism both paralleled and questioned early capitalist discourse on public credit and nationalism, while the Victorian novel refigured debt as the individual, private credit and debt. During the era of high modernism and Keynesian economics, the notion of high culture as genuine value recast the debate over money and national indebtedness. Brantlinger relates this cultural-historical trajectory to Marxist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theories about the decline of the European empires after World War II, the global debt crisis, and the weakening of western nation-states in the postmodern era.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

304 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1996

Reviews

[Chi Pham · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have never come across a book that I displayed such mixed feelings. On the one hand, the book showcases a powerful message: it promises to deliver the connection between public, fetishism and imperialism, to explain how each of these forces depended on or shaped other forces in defining the British experience from the Financial Revolution onward. On the other hand, the book is very painful to read. Very, very painful. As a person inexperienced in literary theory, I found myself struggling through terms, word plays, trying to make sense and trying to make myself believe in the conclusion. I hesitated at first with such grand conclusion, but a review of Barzun's "From Dawn to Decadence" tidbits on English novels (well, let's say, novels produced in England before WWI) clarified lots of things.

The book falls into this category called "New Economic Criticism". Simply put, New Economic Criticism is the attempt to situate economic ideas in cultural context (mostly literature). The topic is fascinating to learn about, but beware of the fight against obscure language. I might never finish this book but not for the fact that I will have to review it in a 8-page essay this Friday, so I hope I have something nicer to say.