When once again the international money markets are jittery and the spectre of bank failures haunts the public imagination, David Zimmerman's book on the cultural logic of market panic in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature makes compelling reading. Behavioural economics – the study of crowd psychology in the market – is again on the agenda, and Zimmerman provides a provocative contribution to our understanding of the relationship between mind and market. He argues persuasively that fiction – both popular and literary – played a unique role in helping people to read the market at the turn of the twentieth century, but in the process began to reach the inbuilt limits of the novel to narrate the dizzying, impersonal interactions of capital. Zimmerman focusses on the period from 1890 to 1907 when a huge number of novels tried to make sense of the turbulent market and the role of emotion in its activities, seeking to control its seemingly uncontrollable crises by inserting its periodic convulsions into the generic conventions of sentimentalism, sensationalism, melodrama and naturalism. As Zimmerman demonstrates, both writers and the mass reading public were alive to the power of the written word as a form of speculation that – in the case of the stock promoter-turned-novelist Thomas Lawson – could quite literally create fictitious capital.

Zimmerman provides fascinating readings of both forgotten writers and more familiar ones such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair. The chapter on Norris's The Pit, for example, is a virtuoso analysis that shows how the speculator Curtis Jadwin fails to control the market, with the market being figured in a dense and shifting set of metaphors as an ungovernable machine whose invisible hand acts to mesmerize its victims. Likewise the chapter on Dreiser's The Financier offers a compelling interpretation of the novel less as a fictionalized biography of Charles Yerkes than as the impersonal abstraction of capital itself. In a similar vein we learn how Sinclair turns to the plot device of conspiracy to account for the problem of apportioning blame, causality and responsibility in the endlessly connected impersonal networks of financial capitalism. Zimmerman's research is deeply impressive, as he expertly unearths the literary, intellectual and economic contexts of the fictional works he explores. This is a work that will prove to be a sound investment for business, cultural and literary historians alike, and it is at the vanguard of an emerging scholarly interest in the culture of the market.