Two new books argue that fictional depictions of loss reveal how eighteenth-century Britons conceived personhood, agency, and wealth. Technically intricate yet pristinely written, Nicole Mansfield Wright's Defending Privilege and Katherine Binhammer's Downward Mobility probe the novel's formal mechanics to examine the stories we tell about law and finance, respectively. Wright claims that by scripting private conversations and interior monologues, fiction can teach us how “foundational principles of societal obligation took hold in the eighteenth century and became entrenched.” Binhammer wagers that narrative's insistence upon “meaningful connection” can show the lie to the epistemological shell game by which “financialization comes to appear as commonsense” and growth economies remain desirable despite their social debris and ecological fallout. Both Wright and Binhammer assert the relevance of literary studies to the present by centering interpretive reading as a political practice for assembling broader coalitions against the “specter of authoritarianism” (Wright) and reimagining what “it...
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