Storm Warnings Joseph Fichtelberg (bio) Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America. David Anthony. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009. 288 pp. The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel: Reading the Atlantic World-System. Stephen Shapiro. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 384 pp. Underwriting: the Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872. Eric Wertheimer. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. 208 pp. A few days after the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators were evicted from Zuccotti Park, I looked up the movement’s slogans. On a website called ThinkSlogans.com, I found a list of nearly twenty. One of the most striking was “Land of the Fee, Home of the Slave”—words that captured the protesters’ anguished cynicism, their sense that market corruptions had sapped American values. But in a stark example of what Raymond Williams called a structure of feeling—the lived experience of an era’s textual remains—the website suggested how the protest was entangled in larger cultural forces. The twenty slogans were framed by ads for online courses and investment companies, and there were links to other popular slogans in advertising, sports, and public affairs. Each slogan, moreover, was flanked by a number indexing its recent currency (“Land of the Fee” was up ten), resembling the daily pulse of the stock market. In Williams’s terms, the website disclosed an uneven contest between emergent [End Page 477] and dominant forms, between subversive protest and the tentacles of trade. Even savage parody, it seems, must contend with the market’s awesome power. Confronting such challenges, present-day populists might well turn for instruction to three remarkable studies of early American responses to the market. Eric Wertheimer’s Underwriting, Stephen Shapiro’s The Culture and Commerce of the Early American Novel, and David Anthony’s Paper Money Men all treat the early years of market penetration, roughly from the Founding to the Civil War. Theirs is not the story of eager embrace celebrated by Joyce Appleby and Gordon Wood. The new works see the market as a loss leader, forcing writers to confront the traumatic effects of a disciplinary order. All three writers use Williams’s model to describe the change. According to Williams, close reading of an era’s cultural artifacts involves the investigation of its contending expressions and forms. Texts, like a period’s other material effects, register the contest among dominant, emergent, and residual ideologies struggling for representation, even as the artist works to adapt these representations to new circumstances. Each of the studies under review addresses these elements. Wertheimer’s Underwriting examines the problem of representation from the perspective of insurance: an instrument, he argues, that became a metaphor for seeking stability amid the market’s fluctuating demands. Shapiro’s Culture and Commerce examines the ideological effects of the market’s emergence, and reads Charles Brockden Brown as a model of radical critique. Anthony’s Paper Money Men addresses the material effects of the antebellum market through its responses to panics, those episodic convulsions that provoked enduring psychic loss. Like a latter-day website, these studies suggest, literary texts were sensitive registers of the market’s contest for the American soul. Underwriting begins with an arresting observation. Citing Brian Rotman’s Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero, Wertheimer argues that a founding achievement of any market culture lies in its recognition of the void. Mathematical zero is not only the basis of calculation; it is a metaphor for the fictive power of money, the value of which depends on a social construction ever at risk. Insurance is a defensive maneuver against this stark truth. From the earliest insurance policies, underwriters sought to replace the Christian narrative of helplessness before life’s ills with a fiction that the future could be commodified. An underwriter’s signature on [End Page 478] a policy captures this transformation, invoking “a network of legitimizing practices” (14) that transforms absence and loss into a social claim. “We observe here a strange twist on speech act theory,” Wertheimer notes. “[T]he text calls into presence that which would seem to not require its help—objective experience” (22). From this standpoint, to lack insurance...