Speculating in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel: The Locations of Value in Early Capitalism

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

In this paper, I speculate about speculating in the cultural form and commodity we call the eighteenth-century English novel within the dual discourses of value-the economic and the cultural. The opposition between the two discourses develops within a society experiencing radically new forms and tokens of value based on commerce, exchange and speculation in new financial markets. This paper seeks to locate the eighteenth-century English novel within these disjunctive yet colluding spaces of material and spiritual cultures I link the loss of traditional structures of value consequent to the rise of money as universal equivalent with the rise of the novel form. The formal realism of the novel is read as a version of Baudrillard`s hyperreal, a simulation of a no longer accessible real. Through this exploration, we discover illuminating points of interface between the vexing yet fruitful contradictions of early and late capitalism that defy a strictly linear model of development through time.