Financial Fictions: Emile Zola's L'argent, Frank Norris' The Pit, and Alfredo de Taunay's O encilhamento

Abstract

Frank Norris' The Pit and Alfredo de Taunay's O encilhamento are "financial" novels: like Émile Zola's paradigmatic L'argent, both focus on stock or commodities operations, that is, on forms of using or defining "money"; their plots turn on "speculation," the attempt to leverage a small investment into a large fortune, by playing on a combination of market conditions and crowd psychology. 1 They are not unique for their time--such novels form a cluster during the last two decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth centuries--and are members of a class that Halina Suwala, in her study of Zola, calls the "novel of the stock exchange." 2 Their production and reception are concomitant of global cycles of boom and bust spreading out from France, or England, or (a few decades before the time in question here) the New York office of an Ohio life insurance company, 3 to shake up economies around the world.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.