The rise of the “gig economy” has translated into demands for “flexible,” “creative,” and precarious labor. This development subtends both a decline in reading and cultural representations of decline, which often include a pernicious longing for the disappearing stability of the cubicle and the suburban middle class. Four twenty-first-century US novels, Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris (2007), Zakiya Dalila Harris’s The Other Black Girl (2021), Severance by Ling Ma (2018), and Luster by Raven Leilani (2020), negotiate cubicle nostalgia by representing the work of representation. They ask what comes next, at the end of the novel or the end of the world. They find in the meaning-making industries the remnants of the increasingly futile search for meaningful work. Solidarity, in these books, is sometimes impossible, sometimes elusive and contingent. While neither the publishing industry nor the art markets truly offer a means of survival or validation, some of these novels imagine that those most punished by too late capitalism might train their eyes to see new options. At the end of literature, in the shadow of the climate reports, perhaps clear vision might emerge from a willingness to look both death and our need for each other in the face.

The introduction initially approaches the topic of money and American literature via key passages from the work of Thomas Pynchon, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Toni Morrison. It then traces three key threads running through the following chapters. Firstly, it considers the close interrelationship between money and ideas of American nationhood: how the unity of the “United States” has been fostered, and unsettled, through monetary initiatives, schemes, and experiments. Next, it addresses the interplay between materiality and immateriality – “real” and “imaginary” forms of value – that has been a persistent topic of debate in American monetary history, as well as the closely related question of money’s deep affinity with writing as a different but connected form of value-bearing inscription. A pivotal, money-themed chapter of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) serves as a case study. The introduction’s final section foregrounds the fundamental question of money’s relation to power and identity: its constitutive role in structures of inequality, exploitation, and marginalization and, in particular, its inextricability – as society’s dominant measure of value – from conceptions of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Examples from F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nella Larsen serve to illustrate these ideas.

The McGovern-Fraser Commission had banned ex officio delegates so as to ensure that the nomination process was controlled by ordinary voters. The result was a convention in 1972 in which there were relatively few party leaders or officeholders. That convention also then selected a nominee who badly lost the general election, which party leaders blamed on the absence of officeholders and party leaders. To prevent the nomination of an unelectable candidate in the future, the party decided to reserve a small number delegate spots for party leaders and officeholders (PLEOs), but the PLEOs were pledged to support the candidates favored by party voters in their state’s primary election or caucus. Following another general election loss in 1980, the Democrats created a category of unpledged delegates who could support any candidate they wished – the so-called “superdelegates.” Although the superdelegates never played a decisive role in the selection of the nominee, fears that they would do so mounted over time, and in 2018, the Democratic Party stripped the superdelegates of the right to vote in the first round of balloting, effectively ending their influence in the process.

The leading early twentieth-century US proponents of a transformation in the social organization of money were – albeit far from unproblematically – collectivist and communitarian in ideological orientation, whereas those that succeeded them tended toward libertarian, individualistic, and free-market positions. This chapter offers the first examination of American literature’s connections to this latter wave of alternative currency campaigns, ranging from 1970s calls for privatized monies to contemporary cryptocurrency. It first introduces the foundational articulation of the right-libertarian approach to monetary reform, by the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, and connects these ideas to a classic of US avant-garde fiction as well as a landmark of the American libertarian literary canon. It then explores how two of the most renowned economically-themed American novels of recent decades – Lionel Shriver’s The Mandibles (2016) and Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon (1999) – put a libertarian understanding of monetary innovation into dialogue with complex questions of trust, value, technology, nation, and identity. It concludes by reading an important recent addition to the tradition of American weird fiction – Michael Cisco’s Animal Money (2015) – as suggesting alternatives both to the too-narrow conceptions of the collective and to the privileging of the individual that have characterized visions of monetary transformation past and present.

This chapter reads presentations of maternal loss and infanticide in colonial and contemporary texts to demonstrate how kinship and structures of feeling can expand a potential Latinx archive beyond the borders and timeframes of the US nation-state. It looks to La Llorona, a ghost of Latin American and Latinx legend, to bring two bodies of texts and temporal moments into contact: (1) Chicanx works from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that look to the colonial past, and (2) early modern codices and colonial documents that reach towards an uncertain future. This chapter does not suggest that these two periods meet seamlessly. Instead, it shows how present-day texts and authors who engage La Llorona’s past wrestle with the historical specificity of Mesoamerican codices and colonial documents that present their own timelines and hopes for the future. Ultimately, this chapter contends that La Llorona’s past demands attention to historical loss and discontinuity. La Llorona helps reveal the productive possibilities of a Latinx archive that emphasizes affiliation rather than origins, one best based on resonance and irresolution.

This chapter examines those moments in African American literature when voices lifted in song sing about money. In particular, it treats these moments as self-reflexive turns enacted in texts from the Harlem Renaissance through the Black Arts Movement, whereby the singing voice both rehearses the tropic interaction between monetary and racial formations commonplace in American literature and destabilizes the homology upon which it depends. The result is an epistemological prehistory to the Afropessimist insistence (or realization) that the libidinal economy of an anti-Black world is an economy without redemption.

Early in the nineteenth century, the political parties formalized their nomination process, entrusting the choice of nominee to their congressional caucuses. Soon though, concerns about representation and corruption began to undermine the legitimacy of the process. In 1824, in an effort to displace the congressional caucus process, state Democratic-Republican legislative caucuses in five different states nominated five different candidates for the party. The result was disastrous, with the five candidates splitting the Electoral College vote and triggering the contingent election process. In 1832, keenly aware of the need for a centralized process that would select one nominee for the party, the Democrats settled upon holding a national convention of delegates from the various states to select their nominee. The creation of the national party convention, however, did not democratize the process as much as reformers hoped. As the first national party conventions revealed, most of the delegates were state and local officeholders and prominent citizens. Ordinary voters still remained largely excluded from the process.

The market culture of the antebellum period developed its own accounting techniques and genres to keep track of the flows of money, credit, and goods involved in exchange. This chapter shows how the money form was variously parodied, adopted, and resisted by Charles Frederick Briggs, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, and Emily Dickinson, writers who were forced into a reckoning with the new market society, its moneymaking culture, and its commitment to the practices of accounting.

While the British or continental marriage plot generally culminates in a high-stakes social transaction involving fixed sums of old money, the story of American marriage in realist fiction is often less about inheritance than about the abstract, dynamic, and unpredictable force of new wealth. In both its new- and old-world settings, the marriage plot is fundamentally a money plot, but the kind of money at issue tends to differ in important respects, and the role of marriage in either reproducing or disrupting social conditions also differs as a result. Simply put, if the possibilities of heteronormative social reproduction signified by marriage were the things that chiefly struck the imaginations of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell, it seems that for William Dean Howells, Theodore Dreiser, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and other writers of American realism, money itself was the romance of the realist moment in America. It follows that the American marriage plot often enters the period’s fiction less as the climactic mechanism of social reproduction than as a minor event in the story of money’s own reproductive capability.

José Julián Martí Pérez (1853-1895) seems to have known from a very young age that racial difference and discrimination in Cuba, and its use by Whites as a mechanism for social division, were the greatest obstacles to overcome in the island’s quest for independence from Spain – and especially for the creation of a modern, legally and socially egalitarian country. However, his writing has traditionally been classified as literature, even though that same corpus was meant to “do work in the world,” not just be archived, gather dust, or be dissected for its literary value. His writing was performative in that it was not just descriptive. He believed that language could change the world, not deterministically or relatively, but by resolving contradictions such as the dichotomies that separated people by origin, skin color, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion, and language. Ultimately, it is the rhetorical Martí, the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of his written and spoken words, that needs to be further examined if we are to fully appreciate the transformative potential of many of his writing.

This chapter explores the newspapers anarchists used to create and disseminate an anarchist Latinidad that was a radical, transnational, anti-capitalist, anticlerical, anti-imperial, and Spanish language-based identity forged initially by US-based migrant anarchists from Spain and Cuba. Using the anarchist press in Florida and New York, anarchists rejected the importance of identifying themselves as “Spanish” or “Cuban” and instead forged a cross-border working-class identity. In creating this identity, anarchists focused on their encounters with US capitalism and republican democracy from 1886 to 1898. Such encounters conditioned their perspectives on what an independent Cuba could look like and what it should avoid. Anarchists also debated whether or not to support the Cuban War for Independence. Was it just another nationalist project that would usher in a new, exploitative ruling elite, or could an independent, non-nationalist anarchist society be constructed? These latter debates began in mid-1891– three and a half years before the mambises launched their uprising against Spanish colonialism.