Real Money and Romanticism by Matthew Rowlinson

Abstract

Matthew Rowlinson. Real Money and Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Pp. xi+249. $89.00. An Coleridge famously remarked in Statesman's Manual, but a translation of abstract notions into a picture-language, which is itself nothing but an abstraction from objects of senses; principal being more worthless even than its phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial, and former shapeless to boot. Following Coleridge, critics have often denigrated allegory, reading literature in philosophical or historical contexts symbolically, in Coleridge's terms, partak[ing] of reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates whole ... as a riving part in that unity of which it is representative. To be sure, critics appreciate fact that, in practice, symbolic analysis is itself highly figurative, even allegorical. As Frye noted in The Anatomy of Criticism, the instant that any critic permits himself to make a genuine comment about a poem (e.g., 'In Hamlet Shakespeare appears to be portraying tragedy of irresolution') he has begun to allegorize. In 1970s, Paul de Man showed that criticism undermines its symbolic pretensions by revealing its allegorical dimensions in moments of rhetorical self-consciousness. New-historicism demonstrated how literary works resist their own historicization by making history itself appear as allegory. Still, such acknowledgments are rare. We tend to assume--symbolically--that Keats's poems or Austen's novels tell us about capitalism or interiority or secularism rather than admit that such associations come from us. Real Money and Romanticism takes an overtly allegorical approach to its historical subject: Romanticism's relation to financial history. For a long time, suspension of cash payments at Bank of England, which made Britain a paper economy from 1797 to 1821, warranted little more than a few footnotes in Romantic studies. The last few years have seen several articles on subject and three books: Robert Mitchell's Sympathy and State in Romantic Era (Routledge, 2007), Mary Poovey's Genres of Credit Economy (Chicago, 2008), and now Rowlinson's. But whereas Mitchell and Poovey read both literature and economics historically, that is symbolically, as illustrations of an overarching historical narrative, Rowlinson is interested in what historical method leaves behind, its waste, curious relationality or allegories that exist between forms of value: and literature and connections between them. Rowlinson takes as his starting point Marx's dictum that money is a social relation. Money exists as difference between values of commodities in exchange. It comes into being when that relation is reified in a system of price or credit, and when commodities disappear persists in a symbolic or sublime form. This story has been told since before Greeks. Yet, following recent work in anthropology and sociology, as well as a panoply of critical theorists from Freud and Mauss to Derrida and Zizek, Rowlinson turns this story inside out: monetary objects (coins, bills, records, accounts, books) survive their conversion into and retain traces of social relations that form abandons. Thus, when a check is endorsed, it can pass as from one recipient to another. But in retaining form of a written contract, endorsed check retains traces of original exchange and its status as is exposed as a further relation dependent on it. Rowlinson calls these surviving monetary objects curiosities; while he does not cite recent important work by Ina Ferris, Katie Trumpener, and Susan Manning, there is much in Rowlinson's argument that will, I think, attract anyone interested in theoretical implications of Romantic antiquarianism. To this already difficult theoretical argument Rowlinson adds an equally controversial historical one. …