Totuus ja spekulaatio

Raha realistisessa kirjallisuudessa

• Tiina Käkelä-Puumala Helsingin yliopisto

DOI: https://doi.org/10.30665/av.74973

Abstrakti

Truth and Speculation: Money in Realist Fiction

The article focuses on representations of money in classical realist (1850–1880) fiction from two angles. Firstly, it looks at how descriptions of money in realist fiction reflect the great monetary changes of the 19th century (most notably, the universalization of paper money and credit, and the emergence of market society), and their effect on people’s mental image of money. During the 19th century money changes from a relatively stabile token of wealth into a volatile thing with speculative value, and the emotions related to this change – desire and distress – are often described with great precision in realist fiction. Secondly, this article examines how paper money in realist fiction often foregrounds the problem of credibility in representation as such, in spite of the fact that credibility was the cornerstone of realist poetics. In this study, the question of credibility, and the kind of double standard it requires from both readers and money users, is seen through concepts of speculation and gold standard. Both concepts refer to actual 19th-century economic phenomena. But they have also been used by literary critics like Catherine Gallagher, Walter Benn Michaels and Jean-Joseph Goux as descriptive metaphors for reading strategies that are essentially modern: reading fictional narrative as plausible.