Financed Narratives: Liquidity in Defoe's Fictions
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This essay seeks to chart the convergence of fiction and finance in Defoe's novels, particularly the manner in which the impersonal force of “liquidity” or liquid wealth compels, inspires, and resolves the plot. Defoe's fictions are “financed narratives” in that their crucial hinges and wedges are bolstered by a logic of finance. Roxana and Moll Flanders, in particular, take part in the emergence of a computational approach to life and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This language of figures has close affinity with the ascendency of financial capitalism in London, which Defoe's fictions adopt in the form of a logic of liquidity, of conversion of human relationship and agency into liquid wealth. Roxana the “fortunate mistress” and to a less extent Moll whose “business” it is to pocket money from others are driven by a self-authenticating pursuit of liquid wealth, often aided by institutional intermediaries of the emerging finance market, such as Sir Robert Clayton, strategically placed by the author for the benefit of his economically vigilant “Man-Woman” who are free from patriarchal ties thanks to their financial fortune. Finance in Defoe's narratives leads to a unique encounter of human life story with the inhuman logic of liquidity, whose bold, rigorous, unflinching explorations remain unique in both literary and economic histories.
Abstract
This essay seeks to chart the convergence of fiction and finance in Defoe's novels, particularly the manner in which the impersonal force of “liquidity” or liquid wealth compels, inspires, and resolves the plot. Defoe's fictions are “financed narratives” in that their crucial hinges and wedges are bolstered by a logic of finance. Roxana and Moll Flanders, in particular, take part in the emergence of a computational approach to life and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. This language of figures has close affinity with the ascendency of financial capitalism in London, which Defoe's fictions adopt in the form of a logic of liquidity, of conversion of human relationship and agency into liquid wealth. Roxana the “fortunate mistress” and to a less extent Moll whose “business” it is to pocket money from others are driven by a self-authenticating pursuit of liquid wealth, often aided by institutional intermediaries of the emerging finance market, such as Sir Robert Clayton, strategically placed by the author for the benefit of his economically vigilant “Man-Woman” who are free from patriarchal ties thanks to their financial fortune. Finance in Defoe's narratives leads to a unique encounter of human life story with the inhuman logic of liquidity, whose bold, rigorous, unflinching explorations remain unique in both literary and economic histories.
참고문헌 (21)
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