Reading the Market

"Offers a vivid picture and unique insight and perspective on the significance of the emerging new financial genre and the impact that it was having and would continue to have on the extraordinary American emotional and financial interest in Wall Street and the stock markets. Highly recommended."

"Reading the Market offers many evidentiary and analytical gems... A provocative and well-written study, this book also adds new dimension to our understanding of the literatures and popular culture of American finance. Knight’s model literary analysis should provide ample material for students of American studies and cultural history, and could easily be incorporated into advanced undergraduate and graduate-level coursework."

"This intriguing book illuminates much about markets and, particularly, about the 'culture of the market' as financial capitalism began its will to power in America."

"Knight’s contribution in Reading the Market to the discussion of America’s financial past is powerful and persuasive. His larger work of personalizing its academic genealogy will have a lasting effect on the future scholarly reading of the market’s past."

"Excellently researched and intricately orchestrated. Reading the Market offers a fresh and original contribution to the history of capitalism, and also to Gilded Age history generally."

"Curating a rich assemblage of commercial, political, historical, and literary materials, Knight offers a welcome interdisciplinary study that contributes to the social studies of finance, the new history of capitalism, financial print culture, and visual studies in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era."

"Knight... ably blend[s] close readings of literary texts with careful examinations of bank records, bond circulars, and other financial arcana, persuasively suggesting that the history of finance cannot be ceded to the conventional realms of economic, social, or cultural analysis... Contribute[s] not only to the field of financial history but also to conversations that have long engaged rural and urban historians; scholars of work, labor organizing, and the corporation; and women's and gender historians... Lively analysis of an esoteric archive will be of value to students, specialists, and generalists alike."

"Compelling, subtle, and deft, Reading the Market is at its best when it applies careful literary analysis to new financial genres. An essential contribution to the cultural history of capitalism, the social studies of finance, and Gilded Age and Progressive Era historiography."