In this highly ambitious work, Mary Poovey engages with the new economic criticism of literary studies in what can only be called a magisterial way. Followers of her earlier scholarship will recognize some similarity in subject matter and strategy here. A History of the Modern Fact (1998) was subtitled Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, and it, too, encompassed a wide array of texts that colluded toward the same end. Since the mid-1990s (and in a few instances since the early 1980s), literary scholars have been hard at work aligning the history of the production of literature with the economic contexts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Marc Shell, James Thompson, Deidre Lynch, Catherine Gallagher, Michael McKeon, and Regenia Gagnier have fueled Poovey's efforts in important ways. But at several points throughout Genres of the Credit Economy, Poovey reminds her reader of her distinctly different objectives: in the first instance, she charts the interactions among different genres of writing, their mediation of value in a value-conscious society, and their separation into distinct disciplines over nearly 200 years. Superseding this project is an even more important aim, argued in the final 130 pages of the book: insofar as “Literary writing” emerges from the other modes of imaginative writing discussed here, its place in a hierarchy of professional expertise can be explained only in relation to a certain jostling and boundary drawing among the disciplines and genres analyzed here. The value of literary productions will rest, ultimately, on how readers have been schooled in the skill of evaluation. It is the tripartite foundation of the book—its attention to genres, value, and literary criticism—that ultimately provides a macroscopic framework for knowledge production from the late seventeenth century to contemporary times.

Poovey at once lays down the gauntlet of her argument by combining three somewhat asymmetrical genres of writing: imaginative writing, the “genre” of money (her particular interests are paper money and forms of paper credit), and the nonfictional genre of writings about the market. Uniting these three genres, Poovey argues, is their considerable task of mediating value in a money-saturated society of Britain from the end of the seventeenth century. An early chapter lays out a peculiar continuum of fact and fiction, a trademark of eighteenth-century epistemology, that will be familiar to those working in eighteenth-century studies. Poovey then deftly guides us through the launch of the naturalization of money, a process intimately tied to fictional writing of the eighteenth century. Her next objective is to sketch out the tremendous surge in the production of “bank paper and book paper” (16) at the end of the eighteenth century, followed by the jostling of these writings into some kind of hierarchy of authority on the subject of value. Popular economic writers, she demonstrates in a substantial chapter, accede to a division of labor in addressing higher and lower audiences; likewise, imaginative writers accommodate or resist the marketplace that threatens to dictate their professional success. Circling back to the Romantic period, Poovey ends by showing how the model of value constructed during this epoch continues to play an important role in debates about the objectives of literary criticism.

Poovey acknowledges that she has packed her vehicle with a great deal of apparatus and supporting material; there are moments, once in motion, when she seems to struggle to keep the whole thing on the road. She concedes that a crucial piece is missing from her mapping of the emergence of economic writing, the participation of scientific discourse; one would want to add the discipline of mathematics to this picture. If readers accept the premises of Poovey's argument, however, they will gain much from her powerful architectonic vision of cultural transformation.

Take, for instance, the naturalization of money, a vital project undertaken by many aspects of British culture during this period. Poovey foregrounds the process by which money becomes taken for granted in an early chapter and then intermittently underscores it throughout the book. Finance capitalism cannily engaged cultural forces on its own behalf. From the time of Daniel Defoe, dealings with money appropriated forms of belief mirrored in the world of imaginative writing. (And because fiction was slow to separate from fact, borrowings from actual circumstances were all the more central to character and plot.) Poovey's insights into the work of genre produce highly revealing readings of James Steuart and Adam Smith, enabling us to see how both writers grappled with or rejected aspects of the fact/fiction continuum, such as the specificity of characters and circumstances, and the use of abstractions. In his strategic application of the latter, separated from historical description, Smith effectively laid the groundwork for the universality and unassailability of economics as a formal discipline.

Poovey would surely agree that her book, like the workings of the historical capitalism she dissects, is full of unintended consequences. In a project of this scope, the lightly touched upon subject can be as thought provoking as deeply probed points. In her treatment of popularizers of political economy, she repeatedly shows how the exercise of coming to terms with financial panics provided the focus for Victorian anxieties about material progress. Her point is that the dangers of these episodes, not to mention the scandals that often generated them, were neutralized by the technical probity of financial journalists. We can also appreciate one of the many subplots of the book evident in this material: the way in which writings about money wrestled with and subjugated an awareness of unseemly elements intrinsic to the capitalist enterprise, such as amorality and irrationality. Poovey's discussion of W. Stanley Jevons and the law of diminishing marginal utility is a case in point. Here was a theoretical model, founded on a new world of psychological insight, that formally addressed the subjective (and sometimes irrational) desires of consumers. Dependent upon mathematical determinations, its wisdom was unlikely to be fathomed by the layperson. And so, in the age of the professional economist, the determination of consumer desire is both a fact and a fiction we can’t understand.

Poovey's objective is to shake up our thinking about economic subjects, forcing discussion across disciplinary divides. With this learned, informative, sometimes difficult, yet ultimately rewarding book, she has succeeded admirably.