Nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary studies has in recent years become interested in markets. Boom and bust cycles—from gold rushes to oil booms to housing bubbles to cryptocurrency frenzies—have shaped the American economy, and literary scholars working in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the recent inflationary crisis have newly considered the role unequal markets play in the production and spread of literary ideas and literary culture. Historians have been exploring these questions, as well. And important recent books, such as Stephanie E. Jones-Rodgers’s They Were Her Property (Yale 2020) and Edward Baptist’s The Half has Never Been Told (Basic, 2016), have considered how markets are never really just markets, and they have called attention to the intersection of financialization, slavery, and the production of culture. At the same time, literary scholars have paid close attention to the relationship between a marketplace for literature and financialization more broadly. Peter Knight’s Reading the Market (Johns Hopkins, 2016), for instance, considers the role financial marketplaces played in the production of a literary marketplace in the Gilded Age. Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect (Duke, 2018) considers how liberal economic discourse in the nineteenth century depended on an imperial policy of “neglect” as a means of ignoring the needs and enabling the exploitation of those who labored for an investor class. And Adrienne Brown in The Black Skyscraper (Johns Hopkins, 2017) has considered how the emergence of the skyscraper in American cities was bound up in a real-estate market that excluded Black homeownership.

This panel will aim to bring together scholars working in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to consider how markets have shaped the production and reception of American literature. The panel will move in chronological order, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth and twenty first. And it will explore the views of various kinds of marketplaces—and the boom-and-bust cycles they depend on—have shaped the production and reception of American literature.

Howard Horowitz will explore how specie mining in the mid-nineteenth-century U.S. exemplified a boom-and-bust economy. Taking as his starting point Mark Twain’s exploration of specie mining in Roughing It (1872), Horowitz will explore how this Civil War-era evolution in the character of finance capital prefigures the esoteric financialization of today, particularly in the realm of cryptocurrency. Building upon the work of literary scholars and economists such as Nouriel Roubini, Horowitz will show links between how nineteenth-century specie mining and twenty-first century crypto mining depend upon similar representative logics when they are described in prose to non-specialists.

Amy Barenboim, next, will consider markets, whiteness, and the work of early twentieth-century writers such as Claude McKay and Ann Petry. Reading McKay’s Banjo (1929) and Petry’s The Street (1944), Barenboim will explore how these two novels—which bookend the great depression—demonstrate the ways that financial speculation in real estate shapes the production of whiteness. Barenboim explores how real estate speculation enabled the production of race before and after the depression.

David Buchanan will explore the end of the gold standard in the United States, which formalized the separation of the US dollar from gold specie. Buchanan traces in Broadway plays at this time a turn away from absurdism and a new interest in the “well-made” play, a more conventional literary structure emblematized by earlier European authors such as Henrik Ibsen and American authors such as Arthur Miller. Ironically, then, the increasing financialization of the American economy produced on Broadway a newfound interested in the ordered, explicable, and conventional depictions of the relationship between the American economy and American financial life.

Finally, Ariel Baker-Gibbs will explore the response of American cinema to boom-and-bust financial cycles in the 1980s and the post-2008 era. Baker-Gibbs explores how the movies Big (1988) and Little (2019)—films about body-swapping, essentially—respond to forms of financial derivative swapping that caused financial crises immediately before both films. Famously, credit default swaps produced the conditions of the 2008 financial crisis, but Baker-Gibbs explores how various forms of derivative swapping shaped the economy in the period of the 1980s and after. And, she suggests, filmmakers responded to these financial swaps by exploring how bodies can and cannot be swapped.

Tracing markets from the nineteenth-century to the present, panelists will explore how marketplaces shaped cultural production. And, in particular, they will explore how the dysregulation of marketplaces shaped American ideas about money, the family, race, and culture.