Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century LiteratureThis book examines the effects on literary works of a little-noted economic development in the early twentieth century: individuals and governments alike began to regard going into debt as a normal and even valuable part of life. The author also shows, surprisingly, that the economic changes normalizing debt paralleled and intersected with changes in sexual discourse. In Victorian novels, sex and debt are considered dangerous activities that the young should avoid in order to save and invest toward eventual marriage and a home. In twentieth-century texts, however, it often seems acceptable to go into debt and engage in sex before marriage. These literary representations followed social transformations as both economic and sexual discourse moved from the logic of saving and production to the logic of circulation. In Keynesian economics and consumerism, governments and individuals were actually encouraged to borrow and to spend more in order to increase demand and keep money circulating. In twentieth-century sexual treatises, people were similarly encouraged to indulge their desires, as pent-up states were considered as deleterious to the physical body as they were to the economic. In this book, the author traces these social transformations by examining twentieth-century literary works and films that are structured around contrasts between repressive and expansive forms of economics and sexuality. He studies a range of authors, including James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, Zora Neale Hurston, and Frank Capra. The book ends with the 1960s, because after that decade deficits no longer seemed the cure for anything, and the advocacy of sexual indulgence dwindled. For half a century, however, the intersections of sexual and economic discourses created a sense that society was on the verge of a vast transformation. The artists studied in this book were fascinated by such a prospect, but remained ambivalent, as it seemed that their dreams of escaping dull bourgeois life and ending repression were becoming true because of the influence of the crassest economic policies. |
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... policies and theories of deficit spending combined with an explosion of consumer credit in the 1920s and 1930s to radically alter personal and public economic morality : people at all levels of income were encouraged to spend money , to ...
... policies and individual economic acts are stated . Certain tropes , themes , and models are in a sense ac- cepted by all sides , and shape the disagreements . The anticonsumerist arguments have been most prominent in cultural criticism ...
... policies . In the middle of my book , I turn to three authors who were active members of deficit - era economic movements : Virginia Woolf , who saw in the consumerist movement known as Cooperation a possible antidote to war and ...
... policies have dis- appeared , but they now seem secondary to New Classical and Monetarist economics . Deficit spending by the government no longer appears the cure for much of anything ; indeed , it has become recast as the source of a ...
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Contents
1 | |
The Freedom to Borrow in Ulysses | 19 |
The Financier 46 | 46 |
The Great Gatsby | 72 |
The National Cures of Ezra Pound | 121 |
Their Eyes | 173 |
Normalizing Debt in the Movies | 197 |
Notes | 217 |
Index | 235 |
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Deficits and Desires: Economics and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Literature Michael Tratner No preview available - 2002 |