Robert J. Balfour, ed. Culture, Capital and Representation. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. ISBN: 9780230246454. Price: US$80.00/£50.00

Robert Balfour’s collection is a welcome contribution to the new economic criticism. It offers interdisciplinary, as well as historical, national, and imperial span. Contributors include scholars of language and literature, art history, communications and media, and finance as well as the history of economic thought. Historically, the range is from the seventeenth to the early-twenty-first century. Three of the ten essays focus on the nineteenth century. The collection ranges from Britain and France to colonies and ex-colonies such as Ireland, Canada, the United States, and Panama. This is very much a collection, of the nature of a medley or miscellany, but some themes recur, including themes of representation that link economics—the focus is capitalist economics—to other systems of representation such as language, literature, figuration and tropes, and representative government. Also linking economics and other representational systems is the factor of time which generates themes of temporal dynamics and the bearing of history. As to approach, one must speak again of medley or miscellany—close reading, image studies, historicism, cultural studies, Jungian archetypes and mythopoetics, Marxist analysis, gender, race, and class, post-colonialism. There is a tinge of the distaste commonly found in literary and cultural scholarship on the Romantic, Victorian, and other periods when it comes to capital. Still as a work of new economic criticism the collection widens perspective. Romanticists will find special interest in György Fogarasi’s essay on epitaphic cash flow, which addresses the language of economics built into the English language and literary expression in Thomas Gray’s and William Wordsworth’s poetry. Fogarasi is concerned with the idea of payment within “paying attention” (68). More particularly, he is concerned with paying attention to the dead, as in melancholy contemplation of gravestone inscriptions, memorials of the departed, ruined monuments, and other epitaphic signs and signifiers. Attention paid to the dead makes very evident the factor of time involved in payment in general, as almost no exchange is instantaneous. Nor does it provide instant gratification. Where there is working, producing, bringing to market, money, credit, a contract, there is temporal displacement—an interval of deferred benefit between incurring expense or giving away and getting back again. In Fogarasi’s readings, the exchange for remembering in honor, which takes its toll in tears, is to be, in turn, so remembered in honor, to enjoy like tribute. But in the case of such stark temporal displacement as divides the living and the dead, the parties to exchange will not remain the same; payers and payees of attention will also be displaced. With these displacements, what secures the deal? “Tintern Abbey” (1798) perhaps provides the best illustration, though it is not the poem Fogarasi spends the most time on. The poet pays sad attention to past time memorialized by the ruined abbey and also by living figures who are withdrawing, losing substance as part of present life, the Hermit and “vagrant dwellers” in the abbey’s surrounding landscape. Where is the poet’s repayment to come from? It cannot come from the past but, if it is to come, must come from the future, from a new party, from his sister Dorothy’s paying sad attention to him years later when he is absent, maybe dead, through her revisitation of Tintern Abbey. Different time, new party—the security of exchange is indeed uncertain. This is wonderfully suggestive. I would say Fogarasi’s analysis turns more on gift exchange than capitalist economics as such. However, the imponderables of time—deferral, shifting parties, uncertainty—such as capitalism seeks to control for, still remain. Victorianists will find interest in Ruth Livesey’s essay on money, mankind, and suffrage in Our Mutual Friend, which locates Charles Dickens’s 1864-65 novel …