Realizing Capital

Anna Kornbluh is Associate Professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago. She coordinates InterCcECT, the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory, and is a founding member of the V21 Collective (Victorian Studies for the Twenty-First Century).

"This highly original and far-reaching book puts Marx and Freud into an exciting new dialogue with the Victorian novel. Kornbluh reads these imposing thinkers as engaged in the same project as the realist novelists, all of them struggling to defamiliarize the frighteningly fictitious character of capital. Offering thrilling new insights into Great Expectations, Middlemarch, and The Way We Live Now, this book culminates in a tour de force reading of Marx's Capital as a Bildungsroman and a radical rethinking of Freud's 'psychic economy.'" -- -Caroline Levine University of Wisconsin, Madison "Realizing Capital is not just about the psychic life of financial capital, about how the mad dance of the capital affects human psyche, and about how Victorian literature from Dickens onwards registered the psychic distortions imposed by the mad circulation of the capital. The underlying premise is a much more radical one: the psychic life of capital, the way individuals experience and fictionalize financial circulation, is a key ingredient of economic reality itself, since the reality of the financial capital is itself structured like a fiction. Although Kornbluh's book deals with Victorian England, it holds a mirror to our era - if you want to understand what goes on today, how a madness like the 2008 meltdown was possible, read Realizing Capital!" -- -Slavoj Zizek University of Ljubljana "By tracing the cultural circulation of two specific tropes - "fictitious capital" and "psychic economy" - Kornbluh makes a compelling argument about the complex figurative ties that bind the realist novel to our understanding of both capitalism and the psyche. This exciting and original book will make us reconsider the novel's cultural work as well as that of its criticism." -- -Mario Ortiz-Robles University of Wisconsin-Madison "'Realizing Capital' should be essential reading for anyone wishing to follow cutting edge work on the form of the Victorian novel." -- -Adela Pinch Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "...impressively researched, highly inventive, and powerfully driven by original close readings of nineteenth-century fiction and non-fiction." -- -Zarena Aslami Michigan State University

• Acknowledgments Introduction: "A Case of Metaphysics": Realizing Capital 1. Fictitious Capital/Real Psyche: Metalepsis, Psychologism, and the Grounds of Finance 2. Investor Ironies in Great Expectations 3. The Economic Problem of Sympathy: Parabasis and Interest in Middlemarch 4. "Money Expects Money": Satiric Credit in The Way We Live Now 5. London, Nineteenth Century, Capital of Realism: On Marx's Victorian Novel 6. Psychic Economy and Its Vicissitudes: Freud's Economic Hypothesis Epilogue: The Psychic Life of Finance Works Cited Notes Index