Guides: Recommended Reading: Finance Fiction Fix

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December 2020

Image used with permission from Milestone Films

Finance Fiction Fix stories of people who have money or don't.

The world of finance can provide stories that both inspire and outrage. In this month’s Recommended Reading virtual display of online sources, transport yourself to that world with novels and feature films where economics is central to the plot. From Elinor Fulton (1837), Dreiser's The Financier(1912) and other stories of love and economics or videos like Killer of Sheep (2008) or Songs of the River (1954) revealing commerce as a way of life will provide entertainment over the holidays. There are also eBooks with themes from literature like Fictitious Capital: Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel (2017) or The merchant of modernism: the economic Jew in Anglo-American literature (2003) where you have a meta look at how finance and fiction merge. As well as foreign language items that incorporate economics and business. The list incorporates older stories that offer an intriguing look into how economic life has changed over the years. Don't forget to read the left column to learn of other people's favorites which you can check out from Lauinger or your local public library.

Narratives (old to new)

Elinor Fulton by Lee, Hannah Farnham Sawyer, 1780-1865.
Publication Date: 1837
Western merchant a narrative containing useful instruction for the Western man of business by Jones, J. B. (John Beauchamp), 1810-1866
Publication Date: 1849
The useful and the beautiful, or, Domestic and moral duties necessary to social happiness by Lloyd, Sarah,
Publication Date: 1850
Macdonald, or, The great mistake : a story of real life
Publication Date: 1850
"Boarding out" : a tale of domestic life by Hale, Sarah Josepha Buell, 1788-1879.
Publication Date: 1855
The private purse ; and, Tattle : tales from Chambers's Edinburgh journal by Hall, S. C., Mrs., 1800-1881
Publication Date: 1858
Story of a labourer's wife
Publication Date: 1859
The British wolf-hunters : a tale of England in the olden time by Miller, Thomas, 1807-1874
Publication Date: 1962
The hole in the pocket by Leslie, Madeline, 1815-1893
Publication Date: 1865
Do You Know, Mr. Manager.? Treatment of a Psychological Sales Training Film: Supporting Material 1948.
Publication Date: 1948
Saving Adam Smith : a tale of wealth, transformation, and virtue by Wight, Jonathan B.
Publication Date: 2002
A Hedge Fund Tale of Reach and Grasp by Barton Biggs
ISBN: 9780470604540
Publication Date: 2010-12-28
Financial legend Barton Biggs' fictional account of the hedge world and the broader workings of Wall Street Barton Biggs' latest book is an inspirational rags to riches story of drive and financial talent. Told through the eyes of a fictional insider, this engaging story provides a detailed look at the hedge fund business in the late 1990s and through the first decade of the twenty-first century. A Tale From the Hedge Fund World chronicles the life of a poor boy who ends up amassing more wealth than he ever thought possible. His new fable offers an entertaining look at this field and those who aspire to excel within it.
Sarong secrets : of love, loss and longing by Lee, Su Kim
Publication Date: 2014
A Peacock in the Land of Penguins by B. J. Gallagher; Warren H. Schmidt; Ken Blanchard (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9781626562448
Publication Date: 2015-01-05
This classic pioneering book provides keen insight into workplace diversity. With new tips, tools, and strategies for peacocks and penguins alike, your organization will flourish and take flight! Through the story of Perry the Peacock and his fine feathered friends, bring to life the challenges of birds of different feathers who struggle to be successful in the conformity-minded Land of Penguins. This unique book helps organizations break out of "penguin thinking" in order to tap into and leverage the creativity of diversity. Learn how to cultivate an organizational culture in which new ideas can flourish and innovation can take flight.
The Financier by Theodore Dreiser
ISBN: 1504042301
Publication Date: 2016-12-13
A nuanced portrait of one of the greatest characters in twentieth-century literature. Based on the life of railway tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, the epic narrative spans from the aftermath of the Civil War to the Great Chicago Fire and the Panic of 1873. Both a glimpse of a fascinating period in American history and a timeless portrait of the dark side of human nature, this is the compelling tale the Wall Street Journal hailed as "the greatest of all American business novels . . . [with] an amazingly intricate description of high-rolling 19th-century finance." This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
The Titan by Theodore Dreiser
ISBN: 1504042417
Publication Date: 2016-12-13
In the Panic of 1873, Frank Cowperwood's fortune was destroyed and his criminal activity on the stock exchange was exposed. Now, with his prison sentence complete, he is ready to begin the next chapter of his life. In the sequel to The Financier, Theodore Dreiser presents a man of indomitable force and pitiless ambition. Based on railway tycoon Charles Tyson Yerkes, Frank Cowperwood is widely considered one of the greatest characters of twentieth-century literature. This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
Greenwood by Michael Christie
ISBN: 9781984822000
Publication Date: 2020-02-25
... And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse thrumming beneath Christie's effortless sentences, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival. A shining, intricate clockwork of a novel, Greenwood is a rain-soaked and sun-dappled story of the bonds and breaking points of money and love, wood, and blood--and the hopeful, impossible task of growing toward the light.

Films

Song of the Rivers 1954
Publication Date: 1954
The film opens with a number of different nationalities of workers working together on different projects in agriculture, heavy industry and infrastructure, and shows their enjoyment in their work. The second sequence is in stark contrast, and depicts the labouring and working classes around the world living in deprived conditions and engaged in back-breaking labour. Footage of the middle and upper classes are contrasted with the poverty and misery of the working classes.
The play on one. Heartland by Kevin Billington
Publication Date: 1989
This film directed by Kevin Billington is about a dairy farm owner whose traditions, ideals and successful family business becomes threatened by the policies imposed upon by the European Union.
Hard times by Peter Barnes
Publication Date: 1994
This television series is based on the 1854 Charles Dickens novel of the same name which examines English society and satirizes the working and economic conditions of its time. This video plays as one feature, running all four episodes in order without break.
Killer of Sheep by Charles Burnett
Publication Date: 2008
In KILLER OF SHEEP, the protagonist, employed at the slaughterhouse, is suffering from the emotional side effects of his bloody occupation to such a degree that his entire life unhinges. His refusal to become involved in the similarly destructive, but human-focused occupations of his more affluent friends and acquaintances becomes the odd obstacle to the family's well being.

About Financial Fiction

Motion picture tie-ups : Report.
Publication Date: 1935-1965
mass media, product placement, film, automobile, tie-in (tie-up), Hollywood, film studio, prop
Chrysler Motor Corporation
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism by Walter Benn Michaels
ISBN: 0520908295
Publication Date: 1987-04-21
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property, the invention of masochism, and the battle over free silver, it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social, economic, and legal; and it imagines a literature that, to be understood at all, must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.
The Adman in the Parlor by Ellen Gruber Garvey
ISBN: 1423759370
Publication Date: 1996-01-01
The Adman in the Parlor explores readers' interactions with advertising during a period when not only consumption but advertising itself became established as a pleasure. Garvey's analysis interweaves such texts and artifacts as advertising trade journals, magazines addressed to elite, middle class, and poorer readerships, scrapbooks, medical articles, paper dolls, chrome lithographed trade cards, and contest rules. She tracks new forms of fictional realism that contained brand name references, courtship stories, and other fictional forms. Advertising formed the national vocabulary. At once invisible, familiar, and intrusive, advertising both shaped fiction of the period and was shaped by it.
ISBN: 0-8166-8803-6
Public and Private by Patricia McKee
ISBN: 0816688036
Publication Date: 1997
By addressing novels such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Emma through the lens of the theories of Jrgen Habermas and Michel Foucault, Patricia McKee explores the themes of production and consumption as they relate to gender and class."
Intricate Relations by Karen Ann Weyler
ISBN: 1587295202
Publication Date: 2004-10-01
" "Intricate Relations" charts the development of the novel in and beyond the early republic in relation to these two thematic and intricately connected centers: sexuality and economics. By reading fiction written by Americans between 1789 and 1814 alongside medical theory, political and economic tracts, and pedagogical literature of all kinds, Karen Weyler recreates and illuminates the larger, sometimes opaque, cultural context in which novels were written, published, and read. Weyler's passionate and persuasive study offers new insights into the civic role of fiction in the early republic and will be of great interest to literary theorists and scholars in women's and American studies."
Women, Money, and the Law by Joyce W. Warren
ISBN: 1587296500
Publication Date: 2009-09-01
Joyce Warren has uncovered a vast, untapped archive of legal documents from the New York Supreme Court that had been expunged from the official record. By exploring hundreds of court cases involving women litigants between 1845 and 1875--women whose stories had, in effect, been erased from history--and by studying the lives and works of a wide selection of 19th-century women writers, Warren has found convincing evidence of women's involvement with money. Women from all backgrounds--some defeated through ignorance and placidity, others as ruthless and callous as the most hardened businessmen--were in fact very much a part of the money economy. Together, the evidence of the court cases and the writers run counter to the official narrative, which scripted women as economically dependent and financially uninvolved.
Mammon's Music by Blair Hoxby
ISBN: 1281730432
Publication Date: 2010-01-10
This book explores what the commercial revolution of the seventeenth century meant to the greatest poet of the era, John Milton, and the broader literary tradition in which he worked. New economic ideas influenced a wide range of Milton's most famous writings as he and other authors engaged with the economic discourse of the age, reimagining ideas about self, community, and empire.
Oracles of Empire by David S. Shields
ISBN: 0226752992
Publication Date: 2010-06-01
United States -- Intellectual life -- 18th century
American poetry -- Colonial period, ca. 1600-1775 -- History and criticism
Political poetry, American -- History and criticism
Imperialism in literature
Commerce in literature
Capital Fictions The Literature of Latin America's Export Age by Beckman, Ericka, 1951-
Publication Date: 2013
Between 1870 and 1930, Latin American countries were incorporated into global capitalist networks like never before, mainly as exporters of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. During this Export Age, entire regions were given over to the cultivation of export commodities such as coffee and bananas, capital and labor were relocated to new production centers, and barriers to foreign investment were removed. Capital Fictions investigates the key role played by literature in imagining and interpreting the rapid transformations unleashed by Latin America's first major
Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-Of-Age Novels by Jennifer Ho
ISBN: 0203958438
Publication Date: 2013-09-13
This interdisciplinary study examines the theme of consumption in Asian American literature, connection representations of cooking and eating with ethnic identity formation. Using four discrete modes of identification--historic pride, consumerism, mourning, and fusion--Jennifer Ho examines how Asian American adolescents challenge and revise their cultural legacies and experiment with alternative ethnic affiliations through their relationships to food.
Victorian Sacrifice by Ilana M. Blumberg
ISBN: 0814212263
Publication Date: 2013-09-30
In Victorian Sacrifice, Ilana Blumberg offers a major reconsideration of the central Victorian ethic of self-sacrifice, suggesting that much of what we have taken to be the moral psychology of Victorian fiction may be understood in terms of the dramatic confrontation between Christian theology and the world of modern economic theory. As Victorian writers ... strove to forge practicable ethics that would reconcile the influences of an evangelical Christianity and its emphasis on selfless charity with the forces of laissez-faire capitalism and its emphasis on individual profit, they moved away from the cherished ideal of painful, solitary self-sacrifice in service of another's good... Bringing the recent literary turns to ethics and to economics into the mutual conversation,
Sacramental Shopping by Sarah Way Sherman
ISBN: 1611684129
Publication Date: 2013-10-01
Written a generation apart and rarely treated together by scholars, Little Women (1868) and The House of Mirth (1905) share a deep concern with materialism, moral development, and self-construction. The heroines in both grapple with conspicuous consumption, an aspect of modernity that challenges older beliefs about ethical behavior and core identity. Placing both novels at the historical intersection of modern consumer culture and older religious discourse on materialism and identity, Sarah Way Sherman analyzes how Alcott and Wharton rework traditional Protestant discourse to interpret their heroines' struggle with modern consumerism
Economic Women : Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture
Publication Date: 2013
Economics in literature
Women in literature
Women -- Great Britain -- Economic conditions -- 19th century
Women and literature -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
The merchant of modernism : the economic Jew in Anglo-American literature, 1864-1939 by Gary Levine
ISBN: 0415867045
Publication Date: 2014-08-12
Economics in literature
English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism
Jews in literature
Merchants in literature
Modernism (Literature) -- English-speaking countries
War Stories by Leigh Hafrey
ISBN: 1631570064
Publication Date: 2015-12-23
War Stories: Fighting, Competing, Imagining, Leading advances a leadership model for business that takes Americans beyond combat and competition as the default setting for our daily enterprise. The book draws on feature and documentary films, TV, social science, and journalism to show that, in the 21st century, the United States is reaping the fruit of a long-standing and deep-rooted faith in one take on business practice... Ethical, sustainable business practice depends on leaders who can tell that story of business in society, integrating public, private, and civil sector imperatives for an audience eager to engage them.
Literature Incorporated by John O'brien
ISBN: 9780226291260
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Contents Introduction: The Corporation as Metaphor 1. John Locke, Desire, and the Incorporation of Money 2. Wonderful Event: The South Sea Bubble and the Crisis of Property 3. Insurance and the Problem of Sentimental Representation 4. "Bodies of Men": Abolitionist Writing and the Question of Interest 5. Held in Reserve: Banks, Serial Crises, and the Ekphrastic Turn Coda: The Entrepreneur as Corporate Hero Acknowledgments Notes Index
Consumerism and American girls' literature, 1860-1940 by Stoneley, Peter
Publication Date: 2003
Children's stories, American -- History and criticism
Girls in literature
American fiction -- Women authors -- History and criticism
Young adult fiction, American -- History and criticism
Girls -- Books and reading -- United States
Consumption (Economics) in literature
Corporate Romanticism Liberalism, Justice, and the Novel by Stout, Daniel
Publication Date: 2016
Corporate Romanticism offers an alternative history of the connections between modernity, individualism, and the novel. In early nineteenth-century England, two developments-the rise of corporate persons and the expanded scale of industrial action-undermined the basic assumption underpinning both liberalism and the law: that individual human persons can be meaningfully correlated with specific actions and particular effects.
Fictitious Capital : Silk, Cotton, and the Rise of the Arabic Novel by Holt, Elizabeth M.
Publication Date: 2017
The ups and downs of silk, cotton, and stocks syncopated with serialized novels in the late-nineteenth-century Arabic press: Time itself was changing. Novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk begin to appear in Arabic at a moment when France and Britain were unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo, and beyond. Amid booms and crashes, serialized Arabic fiction and finance at once tell the other’s story. While scholars of Arabic often write of a Nahdah, a sense of renaissance, Fictitious Capital argues instead that we read the trope of Nahdah. Holt recasts the historiography of the Nahdah, showing its sense of rise and renaissance to be a utopian, imperially mediated narrative of capital that encrypted its inevitable counterpart, capital flight.
The Financial Imaginary by Alison Shonkwiler
ISBN: 1452953929
Publication Date: 2017-01-01
Economics and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Capitalism and literature -- United States -- History -- 20th century
Realism in literature
Finance in literature
Money in literature
American fiction -- 20th century -- History and criticism
Dystopia and economics : a guide to surviving everything from the apocalypse to zombies by Charity-Joy Revere Acchiardo (Editor); Michelle Albert Vachris (Editor)
ISBN: 1138051365
Publication Date: 2018-03-19
Government collapsing? Zombies hunting you down? Everyone you know killed by a global epidemic? Not to worry! Economics holds the keys to survival. Often known as "the dismal science", it is particularly equipped to reveal order in what seems like chaos. Economists observe human behavior: what leads us to take action, and the subsequent consequences. How does human behavior change when resources are severely limited, the legal system breaks down, or individual freedom is stifled? The examples presented here shed an eerie light on the principles that guide our actions every day.
An Anatomy of Trade in Medieval Writing by Lianna Farber
ISBN: 1501721445
Publication Date: 2018-07-05
Economics, in our modern sense of the term, was not a discipline in the Middle Ages, although the history of economic thought is often written as though it were. Lianna Farber restores the core economic concept of trade to its medieval contexts, showing that it contains three component parts: value, consent, and community. Medieval writing about trade not only relies on these elements, it presents them as unproblematic. A provocative contribution to our understanding of medieval life and thought, this book implies a need to reconsider the genealogy of economics as a way of thinking about the world.
Fictions of State : Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694-1994 by Brantlinger, Patrick
Publication Date: 2019
In this ambitious book, Patrick Brantlinger offers a cultural history of Great Britain focused on the concept of "public credit," from the 1694 founding of the Bank of England to the present. He draws on literary texts ranging from Augustan satire such as Gulliver's Travels to postmodern satire such as Martin Amis's Money: A Suicide Note. All critique the misrecognition of public credit as wealth. The economic foundations of modern nation-states involved national debt, public credit, and paper money.
Selling the Story by Jonathan Paine
ISBN: 9780674243033
Publication Date: 2019-08-06
Every writer is a player in the marketplace for literature. Jonathan Paine locates the economics ingrained within the stories themselves, showing how the business of literature affects even storytelling devices such as genre, plot, and repetition. In this new model of criticism, the text is a record of its author's sales pitch.
Hidden in Plain Sight by John T. Matthews
ISBN: 9780820356716
Publication Date: 2020-04-22
For as long as the United States owed its prosperity to a New World plantation complex, from colonial settlement until well into the twentieth century, the toxic practices associated with its permutations stimulated imaginary solutions to the contradiction with the nation's enlightenment ideals and republican ideology. How did the reconfiguration of the plantation system after the Civil War elicit new literary forms for dealing with its perpetuation of racial injustice, expropriation of labor, and exploitation for profit of the land?

Foreign Language Items

Vidas sêcas (video recording) by Santos, Nelson Pereira dos, 1928
Publication Date: 1963
This 1963 black comedy, directed by the forerunner of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, is a screen adaptation of Graciliano Ramos' 1938 novel of the same name.
Cilantro y perejil (video recording) by Rafael Montero
Publication Date: 1996
This film is about a couple that separates after 10 years of marriage and their coping with an economic crisis.
La caída de los cuerpos by Druon, Maurice, 1918-2009
Publication Date: 2013
Stock Market Crash, 1929
France -- Social life and customs -- 20th century
France -- History -- 1914-1940
Historical fiction
Novels of manners
Historia del dinero by Pauls, Alan, 1959-
Publication Date: 2013
Argentine fiction -- 20th century
Money -- Argentina
Argentina -- Economic policy
El financiero by Dreiser, Theodore
ISBN: 8446043718
Publication Date: 2017
Capitalists and financiers
El estoico by Dreiser, Theodore.; Martín Pinto, María José, traductor.
ISBN: 9788446045281
Publication Date: 2018
Novela
Libros electronicos
Contra la arrogancia de los que leen
ISBN: 8494958631
Publication Date: 2018
BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Media & Communications
Books and reading
Literature