Nationalism represents, advances, and protects the interests of a national “people,” but the metaphor of bodily nativity at the core of claims to national unity proved increasingly implausible for a United States that, in the buildup to and the aftermath of the Civil War, proved to be more of a politically divided house than a corporeally singular nation. Efforts of mid-century writers like John W. Deforest and Walt Whitman to imagine a US nation-state as a heterosexual conjugal union between a single, feminized, national body and its governing state-as-husband would face challenges from later writers like William Dean Howells, who imagined increasingly intensive ways for racial difference within this single national body to undermine national unity figured as corporeal nativity. Responding at century’s end to such racial fractures in corporeal unity, W. E. B. Du Bois would displace the now-untenable conjugal union of the US nation-state with a double-consciousness located within the US citizen’s individual self. This hyphenated identity, grounded in a color line, installs the failed legacy of nineteenth-century US nationalism at the core of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century US citizens understand and describe their own and others’ imperial Americanness.

This introduction serves as a preface to the volume and provides an overview of the purpose of this Companion, and a paragraph about each essay in the collection.

The historian’s task is to narrate, but he must also win credibility for that narrative: his task is therefore also to persuade his audience that he is the proper person to tell the story and, moreover, that his account is one that should be believed. In his capacity as persuader, the historian will often try to shape the audience’s perception of his character and to use this as an additional claim to authority; indeed, among the Roman historians, where explicit professions of research are rarer than with the Greeks, the shaping of the narrator’s character takes on a correspondingly larger role. But most of the historians, Greek and Roman, try to shape their audience’s perception of their character. Nor is this surprising when we consider the teachings of rhetoric.

The conclusion summarizes the book’s arguments concerning the influence of polarization and the fracturing of norms on the judicial process, and also its remedial suggestions.

Via an analysis of Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series, this chapter argues that character – the notion that a person’s value is defined by attributes of character – was the dominant value form shaping novelistic poetics under the nineteenth-century industrial economy. Trollope’s novels bear witness to the growing influence of financial transactions in the British economy. Upon first glance, Trollope’s critique of finance capital is fairly well worn, embedded as it is in anti-Semitic and xenophobic tropes, but this chapter focuses on how the financial narratives in Can You Forgive Her? (1864) and The Prime Minister (1876) cast finance capital as an affront to the very logic of character as a novelistic value form. In those novels, we begin to see the unraveling of character, which opens up the possibility for another literary value form to emerge under modernism.

Drawing on Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century, the introduction develops a theory of finance capital as a complex historical process, which, during the modernist period, involved the economic and cultural turn toward London, the rise of the modern corporation, the growth of the professional classes, and the emergence of affect as value form. The introduction differentiates this definition of finance capital from those definitions that inform the field of critical financial studies, and it surveys economic criticism in modernist studies to demonstrate the minimal attention paid to finance capital in the field despite the fact that the period corresponds to an era of rapid and widespread financialization. The introduction argues that the crisis in representation often identified with modernism participates in a historical moment of financial crisis as artists and intellectuals account for the emergence of new value forms like speculation, volatility, risk, and affect.

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles is motivated by questions surrounding the legibility of character, and it begins to associate those questions with the increasing economic and cultural influence of London. As an ostensibly provincial novel, Tess is an important test case for the claim that the financialization of the British economy was accompanied by a cultural turn toward London. This chapter argues that Tess is in fact a London novel as it depicts a provincial Wessex infused with the economic and spatial logic of London, a logic that poses problems for the reading of character in the novel, as it depicts Angel Clare mistakenly interpreting Tess’s character through a pastoral rather than urban hermeneutic.

This chapter explores how The Moonstone and A Study in Scarlet are interested in finance capital even though they do not appear to concern themselves with such questions. They are both interested in the collapse of character as value form and in the appearance of professional class characters. As the earlier novel, The Moonstone remains committed to the ethical universe of class society and shores up the value form of character. As such, it serves as a point of contrast to A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes novel. Traditionally marginalized in literary studies as an example of popular detective fiction, A Study in Scarlet can be read as a proto-modernist novel that participates in the historical process of finance capital in two ways: It orients its ethical universe around the emerging professional society, and its structure refuses to resolve contradictions in the legibility of character.

This chapter interprets Virginia Woolf’s The Waves through the economic theory of John Maynard Keynes. Keynes’s The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money waxes nostalgic for a world of industrial capital where people with good characters invest in respected businesses over the long term. Keynes blames the “great slump” on a system of financial speculation made possible by the modern corporation that encourages investors to anticipate and value the vacillations of popular opinion instead of sound business practices. This chapter argues that Woolf’s novel encodes the logic of financial speculation as described by Keynes in her depiction of characters who redefine themselves according to fluctuating social configurations. The resulting novelistic poetics constitute an aesthetic of volatility characteristic of high modernism that anticipates the emergence of affective intensity as the dominant value form of our own era of capitalism.

Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark maps the distinction between the country and the city onto the geopolitical scale of colonial metropole and periphery, where the colonial periphery is the semiotic placeholder for the role that London plays in the previous two chapters as the space that disrupts conventional novelistic poetics. In Anna Morgan, two worlds that do not compute – the financialized metropole of London and the preindustrial periphery – collide and the result is a character that operates according to the logic of affect rather than conventional narratives of sentiment and emotion. Her character thereby anticipates the emergence of affect as value form.

This chapter situates Ian McEwan in the history of the novel of ideas, arguing that he reclaims this contested aesthetic space, producing rich and satisfying works. In doing so he pushes the boundaries of literary realism, producing a new kind of hybrid: ideational realism. The essay focuses on four novels – The Child in Time (1987), Enduring Love (1997), Saturday (2005) and Machines Like Me (2019) – a quartet of novels that illustrates the development of ideational realism throughout McEwan’s career. In these novels influential contemporary thinking is pressure-tested in the creative realm: we are invited to question the implications of science as we witness the parameters of the social novel being stretched, adjusted, and re-established. Thus, these novels represent a limited form of experimentalism, in which the significance of scientific ideas is tested, as the social relevance of realist fiction is consolidated.

This chapter considers Irish Murdoch’s torn feelings about the role of philosophy in fiction. Such ambivalence, I argue, expresses her broader concerns about the role of ‘ideas’ both in art and in life. Murdochs’s novels are often embarrassed by their own conceptuality and yearn for a more brute contact with the world that has no recourse to the mediating role of ideas and theories. But this wish is also exposed as a fantasy in her work. Literature in Murdoch is a form of thought and is subject to its limitations. Not only does it rely on concepts, it is also pulled between different aspects of thinking: between particular and general viewpoints and inner and outer perspectives. As I show, the friction between these modes of thought accounts for the uneven form and philosophical power of Murdoch’s fiction.

When attention is paid to the ways characters perform and are performed in anime narratives, it becomes apparent that there are certain regularly utilized approaches to the character acting widespread in anime’s animation. Two of the most prominent modes of performance have been called embodied acting and figurative acting. Each uses distinct techniques to act out a specific character’s personality and, in the process, imply different notions of selfhood. This chapter examines the specific utilization of embodied and figurative acting in Yūri!!! on Ice and how these interrelated modes of performance dovetail with the narrative. Through its balancing of embodied and figurative modes of performance, the anime moves between an individualized self whose interior is expressed externally and an open acknowledgment of the interrelation of external others in the performance of self and gender.

Within the last two decades, the specialized term “chara” has gained recognition for denoting fictional beings that seem typical for Japanese popular media. Usually, a distinction is made that charas – distinguished from “characters” – are somehow independent of the narrative. Since the term emerged in a variety of different discourses, however, it serves many contradictory functions. This chapter maps different ways to conceptualize the protagonists of Japanese popular culture as charas with regard to the popular franchise Demon Slayer (Kimetsu no Yaiba). It introduces four relevant oppositions: “consequentiality versus cartoonishness,” “representational realism versus ludic realism,” “narrative consumption versus database consumption,” and “authorized works versus secondary productions.” What connects all these vastly different meanings of charas and the respective “other sides of narrative” is a shared interest in characters not as parts of closed, fictional stories or worlds but as nodal points of historically changing media practices and conventionalized modes of imagination and participation.

This chapter examines how essayistic personae enabled writers and readers to understand personhood as a means of making a unity out of multiplicity. It draws on Thomas Hobbes’s theory of the person to track how essayistic personae both depicted corporate personhood and themselves served as corporate persons, allowing many writers, real or imagined, to write as one. It also uses Locke’s theory of personhood to show how essayistic personae present conscious persons as contingent unities imposed upon multitudinous thoughts and experiences. Essayistic personae not only extended personhood to non-human beings, such as corporations and animals, they also drew attention to the limited nature of personhood for many human beings, including married women and enslaved people.

This chapter examines Harriet Martineau’s approach to gender politics through her understanding of ‘manliness’ as explored in a selection of her Illustrations of Political Economy (1832−4). It was a concept essential to her configuration of male leadership fit for the testing times of the early 1830s, and highly topical. Published when the pressures experienced by men of all classes were being highlighted in periodicals and novels, the tales address the differences between ‘personality’ and ‘character’ in crises faced by fathers and husbands, magistrates and petty criminals, trades union activists, landowners, and slave-owners, at home and in the colonies, as they debate the injustices of their living and working conditions. This chapter argues that Martineau’s interventions in contemporary debates about masculinity shift the focus to a new kind of conscientious working man whose values are tested in cross-class dialogues in public places. It explores the ways in which the Illustrations show how men collaborate and compete within their communities, and the ambiguous gender messages arising from patterns of reward and punishment that seem to devalue otherwise positive characteristics.