Nicky Marsh – författare

Invested examines the perennial and nefarious appeal of financial advice manuals.  Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening.  Invested tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities.

What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? Show me the money documents how the financial world has been imagined in art, illustration, photography and other visual media over the last three centuries in Britain and the United States. It tells the story of how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible and self-referential nature of money, from the South Sea Bubble to our current crisis.Show me the money sets out the history and politics of representations of finance through five essays by academic experts and curators, and is interspersed with provocative think pieces by notable public commentators on finance and art. The book, and the exhibition on which it is based, explore a wide range of images, from satirical eighteenth-century prints by William Hogarth and James Gillray to works by celebrated contemporary artists such as Andreas Gursky and Molly Crabapple. It also charts the development of an array of financial visualisations, including stock tickers and charts, newspaper illustrations, bank adverts and electronic trading systems.

Invested examines the perennial and nefarious appeal of financial advice manuals.  Who hasn’t wished for a surefire formula for riches and a ticket to the good life? For three centuries, investment advisers of all kinds, legit and otherwise, have guaranteed that they alone can illuminate the golden pathway to prosperity—despite strong evidence to the contrary. In fact, too often, they are singing a siren song of devastation. And yet we keep listening.  Invested tells the story of how the genre of investment advice developed and grew in the United Kingdom and the United States, from its origins in the eighteenth century through today, as it saturates our world. The authors analyze centuries of books, TV shows, blogs, and more, all promising techniques for amateur investors to master the ways of the market: from Thomas Mortimer’s pathbreaking 1761 work, Every Man His Own Broker, through the Gilded Age explosion of sensationalist investment manuals, the early twentieth-century emergence of a vernacular financial science, and the more recent convergence of self-help and personal finance. Invested asks why, in the absence of evidence that such advice reliably works, guides to the stock market have remained perennially popular. The authors argue that the appeal of popular investment advice lies in its promise to level the playing field, giving outsiders the privileged information of insiders. As Invested persuasively shows, the fantasies sold by these writings are damaging and deceptive, peddling unrealistic visions of easy profits and the certainty of success, while trying to hide the fact that there is no formula for avoiding life’s economic uncertainties and calamities.

'[I] wonder how we have managed without such a text.' –Rita Raley, UCSB, USAGlobalization has had a huge impact on thinking across the humanities, redefining the understanding of fields such as communication, culture, politics, and literature. This groundbreaking Reader is the first to chart significant moments in the emergence of contemporary thinking about globalization and explore their significance for and impact on literary studies. The book's three sections look in turn at: an overview of globalization theory and influential works in the fieldthe impact of globalization on literature and our understanding of the 'literary'how issues in globalization can be used to read specific literary texts.Containing essays by leading critics including Arjun Appadurai, Jacques Derrida, Simon Gikandi, Ursula K. Heise, Graham Huggan, Franco Moretti, Bruce Robbins and Anna Tsing, this volume outlines the relationship between globalization and literature, offering a key sourcebook for and introduction to an exciting, emerging field.

'[I] wonder how we have managed without such a text.' –Rita Raley, UCSB, USAGlobalization has had a huge impact on thinking across the humanities, redefining the understanding of fields such as communication, culture, politics, and literature. This groundbreaking Reader is the first to chart significant moments in the emergence of contemporary thinking about globalization and explore their significance for and impact on literary studies. The book's three sections look in turn at: an overview of globalization theory and influential works in the fieldthe impact of globalization on literature and our understanding of the 'literary'how issues in globalization can be used to read specific literary texts.Containing essays by leading critics including Arjun Appadurai, Jacques Derrida, Simon Gikandi, Ursula K. Heise, Graham Huggan, Franco Moretti, Bruce Robbins and Anna Tsing, this volume outlines the relationship between globalization and literature, offering a key sourcebook for and introduction to an exciting, emerging field.

This is a key monograph surveying the portrayal of finance and money in British fiction over the last thirty years.Fiction has become increasingly concerned with the political and imaginative significance of finance, speculation and the money markets - from Ian Fleming's "Goldfinger" to Jonathan Coe's "What a Carve Up" and Martin Amis' "Money". This book argues that recent British fiction demystifies the 'weightless' economy of contemporary money and critiques the popular sense of money as being everywhere but nowhere. The monograph provides a comprehensive survey of a large body of fictional texts that have striven to represent and understand the formative significance of finance capital on contemporary culture. In these novels, the implications of finance capitalism for political identity, for class politics, for the sovereignty of the nation state and a new global order are all explored, dramatised and critiqued. Authors covered include Margaret Drabble, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Coe, Alan Hollinghurst, Martin Amis and Malcolm Bradbury.

In recent years, money, finance, and the economy have emerged as central topics in literary studies. The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Economics explains the innovative critical methods that scholars have developed to explore the economic concerns of texts ranging from the medieval period to the present. Across seventeen chapters by field-leading experts, the book highlights how, throughout literary history, economic matters have intersected with crucial topics including race, gender, sexuality, nation, empire, and the environment. It also explores how researchers in other disciplines are turning to literature and literary theory for insights into economic questions. Combining thorough historical coverage with attention to emerging issues and approaches, this Companion will appeal to literary scholars and to historians and social scientists interested in the literary and cultural dimensions of economics.

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.