About the Book
The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism discusses ways of creating value in turn-of-the-century American capitalism. Focusing on such topics as the alienation of property the invention of masochism and the battle over free silver it examines the participation of cultural forms in these phenomena. It imagines a literary history that must at the same time be social economic and legal; and it imagines a literature that to be understood at all must be understood both as a producer and a product of market capitalism.