Credit Culture The Politics of Money in the American Novel of the 1970s

This book offers a new reading of the relationship between money, culture and literature in America in the 1970s. The gold standard ended at the start of this decade, a moment which is routinely treated as a catalyst for the era of postmodern abstraction. This book provides an alternative narrative, one that traces the racialized and gendered histories of credit offered by the intertextual narratives of writers such as E.L Doctorow, Toni Morrison, Marilyn French, William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and Don De Lillo. It argues that money in the 1970s is better read through a narrative of political consolidation than formal rupture as these histories foreground the closing down, rather than opening up, of serious debates about what American money should be and who it should serve. These novels and this moment remain important because they alert us to imagine the alternative histories of credit that were imaginatively proposed but never realized.

Introduction; Money in the disciplines; postmodern times: E.L Doctorow's Ragtime; 1. No place like home: the cultures of American credit; 2. Don Delillo and American credit; 3. William Gaddis and corporate credit; 4. When women counted: feminism, fiction and the money economy; 5. Toni Morrison and the promise to pay; 6. Dorothy's endless return: sacrifice and gender in the novels of Thomas Pynchon.

Nicky Marsh is a Professor of English at the University of Southampton. She is also the co-editor of Show me the Money (2014)