Credit Culture

The book re-reads the postmodern novel, presenting the ending of the gold standard as a moment of continuity rather than radical change.

The book offers a new reading of the relationship between fiction and economics in the 1970s, the postmodern period. It emphasizes the novel's interaction, rather than rejection, of an intertextual history of credit that brings the political implications of class, race and gender into view.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.