California & the fictions of capital / George L. Henderson.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 235-249) and index.

Print version record.

These essays on California's economy, culture, and literature between the 1880s and 1920s show how rural places were made over in the image of capital. The story told here is of the real and imaginary spaces that capital occupied, including its encounters with the realities and representations of race, gender, and class. Beginning with the geography and political economy of agrarian capitalism, Henderson moves on to examine the celebratory, if fretful, ruminations on economy in novels by Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and many other writers drawn to rural California before John Steinbeck redefined the scene in the 1930s.

Introduction: The Alchemy of Capital and Nature; Why the Late Nineteenth-Century Countryside?; The Discourse of Rural Realism; Why Rural Realism, Why the Novel?; Stalking the Interdisciplinary Wilds; Reference Maps; 1 Rural Commodity Regimes: A Primer; 2 Nature and Fictitious Capital: The Circulation of Money Capital; 3 Toward Rural Realism: Variable Capital, Variable Capitalists, and the Fictions of Capital; Introduction; 4 Mussel Slough and the Contradictions of Squatter Capitalism; 5 Realty Redux: Landscapes of Boom and Bust in Southern California

6 Romancing the Sand: Earth-Capital and Desire in the Imperial Valley7 Take Me to the River: Water, Metropolitan Growth, and the Countryside; Conclusion; Notes; References; Index; A; B; C; D; E; F; G; H; I; J; K; L; M; N; O; P; R; S; T; U; V; W; Y

English.

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