Peter Knight

Paul Crosthwaite

Nicky Marsh

Helen Paul

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.

How Three Centuries of Stock Market Advice Reshaped Our Money, Markets, and Minds

Invested

This book supplements existing narratives of feminist poetry by examining how contemporary women poets have interrogated what it means to be public. It draws on recent debates in democratic theory and third-wave feminism to explore the work of women poets as varied as Susan Howe, Rita Dove, Jorie Graham, Harryette Mullen and Leslie Scalapino. It examines how these poets offer a critique of the normative conventions of U.S democracy, particularly its assumptions about public and private, and use their writing, and its cultural structures, to model alternatives to them.

Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women's Poetry

A key monograph surveying the portrayal of finance and money in British fiction over the last thirty years.

Money, Speculation and Finance in Contemporary British Fiction

What does 'the market' look like? What does money really stand for? How can the abstractions of high finance be made visible? Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present 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. Richly illustrated, it tells the story of how artists have grappled with the increasingly intangible and self-referential nature of money and finance, from the South Sea Bubble of the eighteenth century to the global financial crisis of 2008. 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. Show Me the Money demonstrates that the visual culture of finance has not merely reflected prevailing attitudes to money and banking, but has been crucial in forging – and at times critiquing – the very idea of 'the market'.

Nicky Marsh

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