Long before Citizens United and modern debates over corporations as
people, such organizations already stood between the public and private
as both vehicles for commerce and imaginative constructs based on groups
of individuals. In this book, John O'Brien explores how this
relationship played out in economics and literature, two fields that
gained prominence in the same era.
Examining British and American essays, poems, novels, and stories from
the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, O'Brien pursues the
idea of incorporation as a trope discernible in a wide range of texts.
Key authors include John Locke, Eliza Haywood, Harriet Martineau, and
Edgar Allan Poe, and each chapter is oriented around a type of
corporation reflected in their works, such as insurance companies or
banks. In exploring issues such as whether sentimental interest is the
same as economic interest, these works bear witness to capitalism's
effect on history and human labor, desire, and memory. This period's
imaginative writing, O'Brien argues, is where the unconscious of that
process left its mark. By revealing the intricate ties between literary
models and economic concepts, Literature Incorporated shows us how the
business corporation has shaped our understanding of our social world
and ourselves.