Abstract: „The Value of Economic Criticism for Romantic Studies“
Value is, among other things, an important term in economics, which is why ‘negotiating value in the Romantic Age’ invites a broader reflection on how economics and the economy interact with the realms of literature and culture. Such interactions stand at the centre of Economic Criticism and the Economic Humanities – two related research fields which analyse the historically variable interrelationships between the economic, the imaginative, and the social. In my paper, I will, firstly, present an outline of the current state of Economic Criticism and the Economic Humanities, and argue for the general value of engaging with the economy for literary and cultural studies. In a second step, I will present a case study demonstrating the heuristic value of these research fields for Romantic Studies more specifically. I will ‘read’ British paper money and its functions during the so-called Restriction Period 1797-1821, focussing on the question of how economic value has been anchored through cultural and performative processes.
Bio: Justus-Liebig-University, Gießen, Germany
Joanna Rostek is supernumerary professor of English Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen, Germany. She is the author of Women’s Economic Thought in the Romantic Age: Towards a Transdisciplinary Herstory of Economic Thought (open access, Routledge 2021), which won the Book Award of the German Association for the Study of English in 2022 and the IAFFE Agarwal Book Prize in 2023. Among her research interests is the transdisciplinary field of Economic Criticism. Together with Ellen Grünkemeier (Bielefeld) and Nora Pleßke (Magdeburg), she is co-founder of the research network Methodologies of Economic Criticism, funded by the German Research Foundation.