Economies of English

As the world still reels from the financial crisis of 2007-8, it seems timely to reflect on the connections between money and value embedded in all our discourses about economy, Language and literature. The essays in this volume bring together a wide range of approaches to demonstrate how the discipline of English studies and Language and literature studies more generally rest on a goldmine of largely unexamined economic metaphors: from Ferdinand de Saussure's notions of linguistic "value" to the actual economic value of English as a second Language; from Shakespeare's uncanny eye for the fiduciary principle of the modern economy to Joyce's "scrupulous meanness" as an economy of style; from women interrupting the circulation of money in early modern comedy to "living well on nothing a day" in Thackeray's Vanity Fair; from derivatives in the poetics of Anne Carson to the generic economy of gay coming-out films.