David A. Zimmerman – författare

During the economic depression of the 1890s and the speculative frenzy of the following decade, Wall Street, high finance, and market crises assumed unprecedented visibility in the United States. Fiction writers published scores of novels that explored this new cultural phenomenon. In ""Panic!"", David A. Zimmerman studies how American novelists and their readers imagined - and in one case, incited - market crashes and financial panics. ""Panic!"" examines how Americans' understandings of and attitudes toward securities markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds, and history. Blending literary, historical, and cultural analysis, Zimmerman investigates how writers turned to fledgling research in mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy discourse to understand how mass acts of reading and popular participation in the corporate transformation of the American economy could trigger financial disaster and cultural chaos. In addition, Zimmerman shows how writers, by experimenting with sensationalism, sympathy, the sublime, melodrama, and naturalism, explored the limits of fiction's aesthetic, economic, and ethical capacities in their portrayals of markets in crisis. With readings of canonical as well as lesser-known novelists, Zimmerman provides an original and wide-ranging analysis of the relation between fiction and financial modernity.

By what routes and on what grounds do moral blame and shame for social wrongs fall on individuals, groups, and institutions? To answer this question is necessarily to excite the moral imagination, to envision our moral connection to social, economic, and political harms that may appear remote or opaque. Between 1830 and 1860, American religious authorities, novelists, abolitionists, market activists, and political insiders trained this imagining. They delineated how moral complicity radiated across urban social networks, criminal conspiracies, political structures, and economic systems. In this original study, Zimmerman illuminates how new conceptions of moral complicity and participatory sin emboldened activists, animated new literary forms, sparked political controversy, and seeded a plan to racially transfigure the Atlantic economy. In media ranging from gothic convent tales to imperial trade proposals, complicity critics conjured not only the dangers but also the responsive duties and opportunities raised by new forms of sociomoral enmeshment.