Traditionally, white radical Republicans like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens have been given the main credit for the work of Reconstruction that culminated with the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. This chapter shifts the focus to consider the work of Frederick Douglass and other Black activists in contesting the racist president Andrew Johnson and applying pressure to the Republicans to bring about the full citizenship and enfranchisement of African Americans. Douglass had a dramatic 1866 meeting with Andrew Johnson in the White House, and he continued to apply pressure to Johnson and the Republicans over the next several years. The chapter considers some of Douglass’s most important Reconstruction writings, including his essays in the Atlantic Monthly, his great 1867 lecture “Sources of Danger to the Republic,” and the 1881 version of his Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.

The violent disunion rhetorics that swelled in anticipation of Civil War crafted sectional identities for listeners, pitting the interests of opposing sides as irreconcilable. For some, embracing such sectional identities was a rhetorical process. The war-time diary of one Virginia plantation mistress, Ida Powell Dulany, serves as a case study to explore the process of sectional identification and to illustrate the role of proximity to war’s violence in ethos formation. The Dulany plantation, Oakley, sat on a major thoroughfare that both northern and southern troops sought to control, bringing war’s violence to its inhabitants. Oakley represents a site of competing and divergent rhetorical motives and a site of conflict over the meaning of the southern home. The concept of rhetorical becoming accounts for the circumstances, contexts, and locations that shape self-perception and rhetorical action, foregrounding the interplay of public discourses such as disunion rhetorics and individual experiences in shaping a sense of war-time ethos.

On Aquinas’s view, a human being is a material object, a hylomorphic compound of prime matter and the substantial form of a human being. That form is capable of existing on its own, apart from matter; and it does so in the period between the death of a human being and the resurrection of his body, when that form configures matter again. The resurrection of the body is not a reassembly of bodily bits that had previously composed the body; it is more nearly a reconstitution of the substantial form with prime matter. Finally, after death some human beings go to heaven. In heaven, a human being is perfected, so that the true nature of a human being is revealed best in the condition of human beings in heaven. A human being in heaven sees God and is united in loving relationship with God and with all others who are also united to God. In this vision and union, she has the full perfection of her human nature and also her complete beatitude.

We recognize one of a pair of opposites by means of the other, Aquinas says. Just as we understand what darkness is only by reference to the notion of light, we must understand what evil is by reference to the notion of good. What is good is what is desirable. Every nature desires its own being and perfection, so we can conclude that “the being and perfection of every nature has the character of goodness.”1 Evil, then, cannot be a being or nature; it must be an absence of good. Not every absence of good counts as evil, however. A stone lacks the power to see, but its “blindness” is not evil: The nature of a stone has no aptitude for sight, and so it is no part of the perfection of a stone that it should see. Thus, evil is not a simple negation of good, but a privation of good; and we recognize a privation by comparing it with the fullness of being that is characteristic of a thing’s nature.2 Evil is a defectus: a falling short of, or falling away from, what is good.

This chapter focuses on some of the principal ways in which the family has been viewed, or theorized, in political-economic thought, but focuses in particular on the legacy of Edmund Burke’s conservative defense of that institution against radical challenge on the grounds that inheritance materially underpins moral and cultural continuity. Tracing the the complex evolution of this essentially elitist argument in relation to Malthusianism, as well as through both the discourse of eugenics and literary responses to the emergence of a “mass society,” the chapter also highlights the role of Burkean traditions in affirming an orthodox heteronormativity against sexual liberationist movements, theorists, and writers. Ultimately, though, the conclusion demonstrates that the commodification of queer sexuality has contributed to new forms of sociocultural tension at the heart of our contemporary politics.

This Introduction provides an overview of the key ways in which literature and economics intersect. It firstly considers how literary texts encode economic knowledge in metaphorical – and more broadly tropic – uses of economic vocabulary, and via styles and forms that stand in a “homological” relation to monetary and financial systems. It then explains how critics have understood the ongoing overlaps between literature and economics as “genres” of writing, which have continued to borrow conventions from one another, even as the discipline of economics has become increasingly technical and mathematical. The Introduction next addresses the ways in which literary texts register the economic pressures to which they are most directly exposed: namely, the pressures of literary consumption and the literary marketplace. It closes by showing how social scientists are increasingly turning to literature and literary studies for economic insights, and by highlighting the emergence of the Economic Humanities as an interdisciplinary research field to which the approaches covered in this Cambridge Companion have made defining contributions.

The first half of this chapter explores three ways in which modernist writers responded to the economics of their period. It explores modernism’s engagement with the economic horizons of writing and publication; modernism’s understanding of economic thought, ranging across of the ideas of figures such as John Maynard Keynes, Georg Simmel, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille; and modernism’s responses to shifts in the money form itself, particularly changing attitudes towards the gold standard. The second half of the chapter explores the ways in which these issues were navigated in the work of modernist woman writers, including Jean Rhys, Zora Neale Hurston, Katherine Mansfield, Edith Wharton, and Virginia Woolf. In revealing and rewriting the relationship between metaphors of femininity and metaphors of money, these writers were able to explore and reimagine the relationship between their own sexual identities and consumer culture; the meanings of race, paternity, and inheritance; and the possibilities of exchange, translation, and a new international order.

The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Eleonore Stump and her friend and former teacher Norman Kretzmann († 1998), appeared almost thirty years ago. In the time since the publication of that volume, an enormous amount of research on Aquinas’s thought has appeared. The time is right, then, for a redoing of that Companion volume. But because so much time has elapsed since the first Companion volume appeared, it was not feasible just to revise it and reissue it as a second edition. Instead, it was necessary to start over completely. With the exception of Eleonore Stump, all the contributors to The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas are new and have written original papers for this volume; and even Stump’s paper in the first Companion volume has been replaced by an entirely fresh essay.

This chapter compares two generations of economic literary critics who, since the mid-1990s, have examined how literary texts intersect with racial capitalism. Like the authors they study, these scholars are less concerned with documenting the material consequences of racism than they are with interrogating the systemic logic of the sociocultural frameworks through which racialization is reproduced and racist policy is rationalized. The chapter specifically outlines the intersecting methodologies of these scholars and documents their efforts to show how literary texts often engage the language and logic of economic theory in ways that can destabilize racism’s ideological underpinnings. Beginning with the New Economic Criticism of the 1990s and ending with the emerging paradigm of the Economic Humanities, this chapter demonstrates that while the latter may better attend to the disciplinary specifics of economics than the former, it, like its predecessor, has yet to contend fully with the whiteness of the economic imaginary it takes as its subject.

When it comes to God’s creation of and interaction with the universe, it has sometimes been suggested that Christian revelation tells us nothing about the world and its origins, restricting itself to questions of value and not to matters of fact.1 Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, argued that a false account of creation implies false opinions about God.2 Aquinas consistently held that there were a number of truths about the creation of the universe that are central to Christian revelation: first, the truth that the world causally depends on God for its existence and all of its operations. Given the way in which Aquinas conceives of this dependence, this first truth implies that the universe is guided by God’s intelligent ordering or providence. The second truth is that God created the world with no constraints of any kind, including the necessity of creating from pre-existing matter, the necessity of employing causal intermediaries, or a necessity imposed by his reasons (such that he was not free to do otherwise). The third is that the universe was created in time: that is, having a definite beginning in the finite past. Of these three central truths about creation, Aquinas held that only the third is a revealed truth strictly inaccessible to human philosophical discovery, whereas the first and second are truths for which we can give conclusive, independent philosophical demonstrations even though they are also taught by Scripture. Beginning with his theological motivations, I will explain Aquinas’s commitments in regard to God’s creation, the universe’s dependence upon God, and its beginning in time.

This chapter examines the role of imagination in enabling economic actors to make sense of the world and decide how to act and the part played by metaphorical thinking and analytical imagination within the discipline of economics. It starts from the assumption that modern capitalism is a quintessentially creative and imaginative system, characterized by constant novelty and radical uncertainty. The authors argue that economic behavior is therefore necessarily guided by working fictions and, in particular, by fictional expectations that combine individual imaginaries and social narratives with calculation. Building on insights from literary theory, the chapter examines the structuring and performative role of narratives and models and concludes that market power rests with those able to make their narratives and imaginaries count. Championing a new form of narrative economics, the authors propose that economists should employ discourse analysis to read the contingent interpretations that economic actors use to navigate uncertain futures.

The changing structures of what we would now think of as “the economy” during the Middle Ages (c. 450 – c. 1500) left deep and extensive marks on the period’s writing and storytelling. Significantly, this was due to the presence of at least two economic systems developing in parallel: an agrarian-based manorial system and a cash-based commercial system. The chance survival of texts from this period does not provide a unified vision of economics throughout England or even from every century of the medieval period. What texts do survive, however, show us that economics in the literature takes many forms beyond simply the exchange of money for goods and services, the establishment of credit and banking, and the development of complex and varied trade networks. It also appears in how a household is run, in gift-exchange, and even in the language of reckoning of sins with punishment or penance.

This chapter considers English writing about market values from the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries – taking as its termini the dissolution of the monasteries, which began in 1536, and the trade depression of the early 1620s. The chapter portrays some of the give and take between proto-literary and proto-economic writing in this period by focusing on the emergent concept of productivity. It begins by outlining the changing material and ideological conditions that prompted writerly attention to money and trade from merchants, statesmen, and imaginative writers. It shows how apparently limited topics of monetary debate in the period – debasement, usury, and the export of bullion – were amplified into far-reaching critiques of value by imaginative writers. And it shows how these value critiques tended in turn to support an emergent arena of autonomous value in what we might recognize as literary production.