Paul Crosthwaite The Relationship between Literature and Economics

This lecture examines the early twentieth-century culture of popular investment advice in the United States, focusing on its relation to the defining financial event of the era: the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Manuals, guides, and handbooks for the amateur investor (or speculator) flooded the market in the decade prior to the Crash, and the lecture will consider how authors of such books sought to encourage readers to imagine that they might successfully tap into a widely proclaimed “New Era” of unprecedented buoyancy in stock prices.

Dr Paul Crosthwaite is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the intersections between literature, culture, and economics in the modern and contemporary periods.

He is a co-investigator on the Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded History of Financial Advice project, in which the Library of Mistakes is a key partner.