Mary Poovey. Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 496. $24.00 paper. According to one influential account we might characterize as French or continental in its various forms (since to mark it one invokes the names of Blanchot, Ranciere, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy), the emergence of Literature around the turn of the nineteenth century involves a suspension of the dialectical project, or creative unworking. Literature speaks negatively to what is fundamentally a passive project. It is a weak power called into being by language in response to the progressive modernism of instrumentalized work, a lateral exit from the increasingly uniform theory of value.
