Figures of Finance Capitalism

<p><em>Figures of Finance Capitalism</em> brings into focus Victorian narratives by major middle-class writers in which the workings of finance capitalism are prominently featured and reads this interest in finance capitalism in the context of middle-class misgivings about a class system still dominated by a patrician elite. This book illustrates the centrality of finance capitalism to the mid-Victorian middle-class social imagination by discussing a selection of major Victorian texts by Dickens Gaskell Thackeray and Macaulay. In so doing it draws on several new perspectives on British history as offered in the work of historians such as Tom Nairn David Cannadine and P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. Articulating the basic coordinates for a new sociology of mid-Victorian literature Borislav Knezevic views texts through the prism of the mid-Victorian literary field and its negotiations of the contemporary field of power.</p>