ABSTRACT Fueled by the global crises of recent decades, scholarly interest in the interaction between literature and economics has recorded a remarkable growth. Providing new avenues for thinking about the ways in which the shifts in economic paradigms affect literary outlooks and trends, economic criticism enhances our understanding of the constructions of the making and unmaking of wealth in the Western culture. Building on the scholarship about the financial turn of England and the emergence of the modern banking system, this article looks at the rise of predatory finance in William Makepeace Thackeray’s The Newcomes. The article seeks to accomplish a few interconnected issues, one of which is to investigate Victorian confrontations with England’s financial turn. Secondly, focusing on Thackeray’s satirical depictions of rapacious banking, it seeks to understand the unprecedented ascendancy of finance plutocracy and the convergences of finance and power. Lastly, it argues that the novel’s constructions of debt and bankruptcy challenge the liberal notions about the making and unmaking of wealth in England.
Ferma Lekesizalın (Sun,) studied this question.