ABSTRACT
Since the global financial crisis of 2007–2008, the otherwise discreet world of banking and investment has been subject to intense public interest. The crisis suddenly made it clear that the new order of the financial sector—with its shrewd products and complex digital technologies—had immense and immediate consequences for the lives of ordinary citizens. One token of this new interest is the advent of an increasingly recognizable literary genre: finance fiction. After an initial historical overview of literature’s engagement with money and finance, this chapter outlines the current burgeoning field of finance fiction studies. It then offers three renditions of finance fiction in the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, and post-2008, respectively, and demonstrates how in each period, literature incorporates various genres in its attempt to grapple with financialization: the thriller, the tension between realism and psychosis, and the epic. We argue that the relation between finance and fiction is not solely a question of representation, but also one of fictional form and literary genre. By analyzing finance through fiction, the chapter thus hopes to contribute to the intersection of literary and critical finance studies as a dialog between the humanities and the social sciences.
