Money on the Left
Money on the Left is a monthly, interdisciplinary podcast that reclaims money’s public powers for intersectional politics. Staging critical conversations with leading historians, theorists, organizers, and activists, the show draws upon Modern Monetary Theory and constitutional approaches to money to advance new forms of left critique and practice. It is hosted by William Saas and Scott Ferguson and presented in partnership with Monthly Review magazine. Check out our website: https://moneyontheleft.org Follow us on Bluesky
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Money on the Left
The Descent of Money
‘The Descent of Money: Literature, Inheritance, and Trust in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906)’
Rob Hawkes' paper argues that Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and John Galsworthy’s The Man of Property (1906) foreground, interrogate and enact questions of trust, both in their engagements with and departures from literary realism/naturalism and in their preoccupations with the value and power of money. Wharton’s novel is saturated with the language of costs, payments, investments, and debts, while the first of Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels presents ‘Forsyteism’ as an inescapable set of hereditary traits. Both texts, furthermore, implicitly associate money with nature and imagine a ‘sense of property’ as inherited in more ways than one, whilst simultaneously offering glimpses of a different understanding of money altogether: one that reveals surprising connections between literature, money, and trust.
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