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 in the period
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' attitudes toward securities
markets, popular investment, and financial catastrophe were
entangled with their conceptions of gender, class, crowds,
corporations, and history. Zimmerman investigates how writers
turned to mob psychology, psychic investigations, and conspiracy
discourse to understand not only how financial markets worked, but
also how mass acts of financial reading, including novel reading,
could trigger economic disaster and cultural chaos. In addition,
Zimmerman shows how, by concentrating on markets in crisis,
novelists were able to explore the limits of fiction's aesthetic,
economic, and ethical capacities. 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.