| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

David A. Zimmerman. Panic! Markets, Crises, and Crowds in American Fiction. (Cultural Studies of the United States.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2006. Pp. xii, 294. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50.
David A. Zimmerman's book made me nostalgic. I missed those years in my career when, like Zimmerman, I thought a lot about financial markets and the language used to describe them. But the book's larger arguments about connections between novels and financial panics, about a financial world where a writer's speculation on meaning equaled in importance the speculators' thoughts on money, made me long for a time when a novelist's imagination was commensurate with the market. Zimmerman takes us back to a time when events in a novel's plot might spin out as a panic in financial markets and to a time when readers turned to novels to make sense of high finance.	1
Put simply, at the turn of the twentieth century novelists were players in capitalism's great dramas, and readers looked to novelists to sort out the historical and ideological problems of the corporate economy. Fiction writers constructed the imaginary dimensions of financial modernity by taking advantage of the financial panics that upended markets and put all values, including cultural values, into a state of uncertainty. Financial panics staggered the nation, and baffled readers turned to novels to find the comforts of a narrative shape behind the economy's apparent chaos. As Zimmerman writes, "By throwing social meanings and cultural structures into disarray, panics intensified novelists' desire to stabilize markets' protean meanings within familiar narrative forms, to bring markets' spreading effects into aesthetic line, and to make the future they unloosed knowable and controllable" (p. 227).	. . .

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