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Going to market: Credit economies an...

Montague, Susan Ashley.

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Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Adam Smith).

Record Type:	Language materials, printed : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Adam Smith)./
Author:	Montague, Susan Ashley.
Description:	195 p.
Notes:	Adviser: John Richetti.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International60-07A.
Subject:	Economics, History. -
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=9937762
ISBN:	0599390190

Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Adam Smith).
Montague, Susan Ashley.

Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Adam Smith). - 195 p.

Adviser: John Richetti.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1999.

My dissertation argues that eighteenth-century fiction about marriageable women helped create the attitudes and behavior that supported financial credit. Credit, although not new, was an increasingly important part of the economy in the eighteenth century, and its use sparked controversy about the nature of value and representation. Analyzing novels from the early 1700s through the 1780s together with contemporary economic treatises and pamphlets, I show that both novels and economic texts take up the problem of representing immaterial value—whether economic value or the qualities of mind that made a woman virtuous. I claim that the realm of social exchange through which marriageable heroines circulate is analogous to the economic marketplace—in both spheres “value” is arrived at through public consensus and is therefore potentially unreliable. As the century progresses, I argue, novels about marriageable heroines demonstrate an increased confidence in the possibility of assessing virtue through circulating in the marriage market—a confidence also found in economic texts about the processes of economic exchange. I begin with a discussion of Lady Credit, an allegorical figure Daniel Defoe used to explain financial credit in his newspaper <italic>The Review</italic>; I draw attention to the similarities between credit and a woman's virtue and argue that Lady Credit's adventures anticipate the themes that dominate novels about marriageable women. Chapter One explores the relationship between depictions of a financial crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the marriage market in works by Defoe and Eliza Haywood. Chapter Two demonstrates that Samuel Richardson and writers on trade had similar concerns that signifiers (whether social signs or economic tokens) might misrepresent value. Richardson's female paragon, I claim, functions like currency standards to anchor meaning. My third chapter compares courtship novels by Haywood and Frances Burney to Adam Smith's <italic> Theory of Moral Sentiments</italic> and <italic>Wealth of Nations </italic> to demonstrate that they present analogous means of determining the value of people and commodities. My conclusion considers Burney's <italic> Cecilia</italic> with writings on debt from the 1780s, arguing that both accept credit's inevitability at the same time that they fear it may not always be backed by “substance.”

ISBN: 0599390190Subjects--Topical Terms:

1017418
Economics, History.

Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Adam Smith).
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100 1 $a Montague, Susan Ashley. $3 1250644
245 1 0 $a Going to market: Credit economies and marriageable women in eighteenth-century fiction (Daniel Defoe, Eliza Haywood, Frances Burney, Adam Smith).
300 $a 195 p.
500 $a Adviser: John Richetti.
500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 60-07, Section: A, page: 2507.
502 $a Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Pennsylvania, 1999.
520 $a My dissertation argues that eighteenth-century fiction about marriageable women helped create the attitudes and behavior that supported financial credit. Credit, although not new, was an increasingly important part of the economy in the eighteenth century, and its use sparked controversy about the nature of value and representation. Analyzing novels from the early 1700s through the 1780s together with contemporary economic treatises and pamphlets, I show that both novels and economic texts take up the problem of representing immaterial value—whether economic value or the qualities of mind that made a woman virtuous. I claim that the realm of social exchange through which marriageable heroines circulate is analogous to the economic marketplace—in both spheres “value” is arrived at through public consensus and is therefore potentially unreliable. As the century progresses, I argue, novels about marriageable heroines demonstrate an increased confidence in the possibility of assessing virtue through circulating in the marriage market—a confidence also found in economic texts about the processes of economic exchange. I begin with a discussion of Lady Credit, an allegorical figure Daniel Defoe used to explain financial credit in his newspaper <italic>The Review</italic>; I draw attention to the similarities between credit and a woman's virtue and argue that Lady Credit's adventures anticipate the themes that dominate novels about marriageable women. Chapter One explores the relationship between depictions of a financial crash, the South Sea Bubble, and the marriage market in works by Defoe and Eliza Haywood. Chapter Two demonstrates that Samuel Richardson and writers on trade had similar concerns that signifiers (whether social signs or economic tokens) might misrepresent value. Richardson's female paragon, I claim, functions like currency standards to anchor meaning. My third chapter compares courtship novels by Haywood and Frances Burney to Adam Smith's <italic> Theory of Moral Sentiments</italic> and <italic>Wealth of Nations </italic> to demonstrate that they present analogous means of determining the value of people and commodities. My conclusion considers Burney's <italic> Cecilia</italic> with writings on debt from the 1780s, arguing that both accept credit's inevitability at the same time that they fear it may not always be backed by “substance.”
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791 $a Ph.D.
792 $a 1999
856 4 0 $u http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=9937762