REVIEW ESSAY

Not the least of the tasks undertaken by Mary Poovey’s Genres of the Credit Economy is to write a genealogy of the institutions of literature and of modern literary studies by tracing the differentiation, over the last three and a half centuries, of the genres of imaginative writing and of the discipline of literary criticism that develops to support them; of writing about the market, credit, and price, and the emergent discipline of economics; and of the genres of monetary instruments such as bills of exchange, cheques, bank paper, and coins. At some point this history necessarily encounters its own disciplinary activity. The encounter takes the form of a methodological excursus, ‘Interchapter Two: Textual Interpretation and Historical Description’, which marks the book’s key moment of reflexivity. Here Poovey pauses to counterpose to the method of textual interpretation whose genealogy she has been writing (and to which she remains to some extent constrained by a disciplinary force majeure) an alternative model which, following Ian Hunter (1988), she calls ‘historical description’. This move posits that a series of terms lying at the heart of the discipline of literary studies can be placed in rough apposition: interpretation itself, referring to the particular skills of ‘expert’ readers trained in the US graduate system; the concept of discourse, from which she distances herself on several occasions in the book; formalism, understood as a practice of analysis of contradictions or tensions between levels of formal structure in order to expose something like a textual unconscious a practice which is thus predicated on a notion of the ideal organic unity of the text; and value and evaluation, aligned with the Romantic elaboration of a non-economic model of value (what Smith 1988 calls a ‘dual economy of value’), and although this is never demonstrated or argued for implicitly taken to be a problem. The critique of these concepts, worked out through a reading of two critical analyses of Harriet Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy (1832 1834), relies on a small number of more general propositions. The first is that the prevailing ‘formalist’ mode of analysis in literary studies relies on stripping away from an apparently autotelic text two relevant levels of context: the historical context in which the text was produced, and in particular the economic, generic, and classificatory systems which endowed it with precise functions for its historical moment; and the context of reading, in particular the disciplinary formation which mobilizes certain structures of interest and attention to endow the text with precise and historically specific functions for the present. The second, more fully elaborated in Poovey (2001), is that the biological metaphor of the organic whole continues to organize the discipline of literary studies in the US, even in the case of those critical tendencies which reject the notion of an essential or noncontradictory totality. The metaphor subtends a focus on formal structure which has