Money Matters

Richard T. Gray is Byron W. and Alice L. Lockwood Professor in the Humanities at the University of Washington. He is the author of About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz.

"Gray's book Money Matters is the work of a voracious and yet rigorously disciplined intellect, and points to the way to a sustained engagement of the humanities with three centuries of political economy. Unfortunately, books like Gray's . . . are all too rare. In an age where finance capital continues to make good use of liberal arts graduates . . . the liberal arts must continue to speak directly to the historic of economics, and attest to a cultural memory that can counterbalance the rush of amnesia between the screens of global monetary systems. In short, more people should read and think and write this way—and therefore, more people should read what Richard Gray offers in this volume."

• IntroductionPart One: Economics and Intellectual CultureChapter 1 / Buying into Signs: Money and Semiosis in Eighteenth-Century German Language TheoryChapter 2 / Hypersign, Hypermoney, Hypermarket: Adam Muller's Theory of Money and Romantic SemioticsChapter 3 / Economic Romanticism: Monetary Nationalism in Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Adam MullerChapter 4 / Economics and the Imagination: Cultural Values and the Debate over Physiocracy in Germany, 1770-1789Part Two: Literary EconomiesChapter 5 / Counting on God: Economic Providentialism in Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling's LebensgeschichteChapter 6 / Deep Pockets: The Economics and Poetics of Excess in Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter ShlemihlChapter 7 / Red Herrings and Blue Smocks: Commercialism, Ecological Destruction, and Anti-Semitism in Annette von Droste-Hulshoff's Die JudenbucheChapter 8 / The (Mis)Fortune of Commerce: Economic Transformation in Adalbert Stifter's BergkristallConclusion / Limitless Faith in the Limitless: Money, Modernity, and the Economics/Aesthetics of Mediation of Goethe's Faust IINotesBibliographyIndex