Mary Poovey’s Anxiety Mary Poovey. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Britain. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008. ISBN: 978-0226675336. Price: US$24

Works of literature resemble financial investments in the sense that they also demand the participant’s trust in a process that by its nature is unavoidably risky, uncertain, unverifiable. Literature too plays a confidence game. In Genres of the Credit Economy, Mary Poovey presses on this resemblance in order to argue that literature has performed what the New Historicists used to call “cultural work.” Literature has taught us to trust, or to live by suspending disbelief in, those financial instruments that began to pervade society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: paper money, bills of exchange, banker’s checks and so on. It has helped naturalize the “credit economy” that began, innocently enough, with paper money and culminated, spectacularly, in the derivative. It is the part literature performed in this history, Poovey argues, that has made it important. There are many things to argue with in this astonishingly rich, deeply erudite, and brilliantly timely volume, including its willingness (again like the New Historicists, though Poovey disavows membership in the movement) to barter literature’s supposed ethico-aesthetic transcendence for a meager portion of historico-functional significance, and this despite the fact that the history to which she sees literature as functional is one in which she finds nothing whatsoever to approve. That bleak historical meta-narrative is another point of contention, at least for this reader. The much-publicized disasters that the financial industry has visited upon the rest of the world since 2007 might seem to have made Poovey’s historical point. I’m not sure they do, though they have certainly created an ideal environment for this book to get the intense discussion it deserves. If you made a bad investment in a novel, you used to be able to get up from your chair thinking that, though you might have thrown away some time and some affect, at least your pension was still secure. Those days are gone. Poovey’s audience will surely be swelled by the new general insecurity. Insecurity, or what she prefers to call “anxiety,” is in fact one of the major themes on which her book invites readers to reflect. (Poovey has put unusual weight on the term anxiety throughout her extremely distinguished career.) To begin with, there is the perverse proposition that literature has won its significance only by doing something that Poovey manifestly wishes it had not done: by assuaging an anxiety that, she implies, society would be better off feeling more keenly. Literature’s aesthetic function (the suspension of disbelief in fictions) is consistent for Poovey with its historical function (the naturalization of the credit economy), but both are inversely proportional to literature’s ethical or political value, assuming such a concept remains relevant. That is, Poovey doesn’t think the suspension of disbelief is a good thing. We should not allow ourselves to be reassured about our investments. We should try to be as anxious as possible. In this sense, anxiety is Poovey’s highest value. One might think of it as her substitute for aesthetic value. This is logical enough given that her target is naturalization: how these new financial instruments, which seemed alien and dangerous to people when they were first introduced, came to be accepted and integrated into normal life. She implies that this acceptance was a prolonged mistake, that major social harm was done by, say, the passage from coins to paper money. It’s because she assumes this social harm that Poovey also assumes that naturalization must be countered by reader-citizens committed to perpetual vigilance. It’s a questionable assumption. Even those who do not need to be reminded that vigilance is called for in the case of capitalism …