The financial imp: ethics and finance in nineteenth century fiction
Article Abstract:
Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure story 'The Bottle Imp' weaves around the conflict between ethics and finance in political economic theory, which kindled many philosophical debates in the 19th century. The novel warns against the diabolical contracts and deposition of something as security of a bond. While the bottle is associated with money, Stevenson purposely uses the word imp for the term's connotation as the evil of financial credit. The story merges domestic romance with utilitarian logic of finance, but hardly reconciles the demarcation between utilitarian and anti-utilitarian moral philosophy.
Publication Name: Novel
Subject: Literature/writing
ISSN: 0029-5132
Year: 1996
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
Unreadable novels: Toward a theory of seventeenth-century aristocratic fiction
Article Abstract:
French fiction of the seventeenth-century such as Mlle de Scudery's 'Artamene ou le Grand Cyrus' has been labeled as unreadable and incomprehensible by critics from as early as 1850 to the present times and reasons for this are explored. It is argued that it is not the formal generic considerations that render such fiction unreadable as a disconnection between fiction's earlier aesthetic and social functions and the modern ones.
Publication Name: Novel
Subject: Literature/writing
ISSN: 0029-5132
Year: 2005
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
The knowing book: authors, it-narratives, and objectification in the eighteenth century
Article Abstract:
A group of narratives known as "it-narratives" which were popular through the second half of the eighteenth century are analyzed. The narration in these texts from the perspective of objects like slippers, a coat or a wig presented unflattering portraits of human society through a thinking object's fascination with material culture.
Publication Name: Novel
Subject: Literature/writing
ISSN: 0029-5132
Year: 2006
User Contributions:
Comment about this article or add new information about this topic:
- Abstracts: Women's novels and women's minds: an unsentimental view of nineteenth-century American women's fiction. Mrs. Dalloway, the dictator, and the relativity paradox
- Abstracts: The farced epistle as dramatic form in the twelfth century Renaissance. Windings and turnings: the metaphoric labyrinth of Restoration dramatic theory
- Abstracts: Fortunes and misfortunes of the Spanish lyric theater in the eighteenth century. Questions of identity in contemporary Hong Kong theater
- Abstracts: Investigating justice. Abuse in child psychiatry. Resources for investigating toxicity of our environment
- Abstracts: Open minds, open source. At last: computers that do math! The future of computers