What are the best works of literature about business and capitalism?
AND VOTE FOR THE GOAT
The next Western Canon book club is about Turgenev, October 17th.
The next Shakespeare book club is on October 13th.
GOAT Final Round
Well, this isn’t the shortlist I expected, but its the one you all voted for. Now is the final round of voting. And remember, the point is to advocate and discuss—so leave comments, write your own posts, read and write about the novels you think will change people’s minds! Here’s the shortlist.
George Eliot
Hilary Mantel
Jane Austen
Kazuo Ishiguro
That’s right—no Dickens! I’ll leave the poll open for a while so you have time to persuade each other of your choices.
Voting below the paywall at the bottom after some thoughts about literature and business…
Literature and business
Several people have recently asked online about the way literature portrays business, capitalism, and the industrial revolution. (And wrote a very good piece for Dirt about why novelists don’t write about money anymore.) I have been thinking about this for years. The essence of the question is why the insights of economics are not well portrayed in novels. Why are rich people often bad, businesses often boring or grasping, and market economics often ignored or shown as exploitative? As I said in my discourse fiction essay, the rich are merely memes in many modern novels.
Obviously one major problem is depicting the “invisible hand” of the market. But if Hemingway can write The Old Man and the Sea about a man going fishing and Woolf can write Orlando about a woman’s position in society, someone must be able to do something about business. There are of course many writers from Dickens to Waugh who distrust people who make money. Left wing polemics like An Inspector Calls become famous and admired. What about the other side?