Economics and American Literary Studies in the New Gilded Age, or Why Study the History of Bad Predictions and Worse Rationalizations?

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue on Economics and American Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age traces an underexplored history of dissent within the discipline of economics through presidential addresses to the American Economic Association and writings by John Maynard Keynes. It acknowledges the “vexed history” of interdisciplinary engagement between economists and literature scholars, including a recent, halfhearted call for “narrative economics” from 2013 Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller. Seybold suggests that new brands of econo-literary criticism have risen to promise in the last decade and that contributors to this special issue demonstrate the importance of historicism to this subfield, despite its apparent presentist tendencies.