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'Will it smash?': Modernity and the fear of falling

Greenslade, William

Authors

William Greenslade



Contributors

Jane Arthurs jane.arthurs@uwe.ac.uk
Editor

Abstract

This chapter traces the motif of the financial crash in realist novels by Dickens, Trollope and Eliot in which the inherent irrationality of capitalist relations is revealed within a broadly explicable ethical universe. By the end of the century, in novels by Meredith, Gissing and Galsworthy, the bank crash is presented as violent in its social and psychic effects, naturalised as a periodic explosion in the system of capitalist relations: there can now be no easy recourse to a system of moral accounting since ‘good’, in social Darwinian terms, is what survives. Modernity’s ‘other’ in the non-realist genres of the period encodes the ever-present fear of falling back and down into the primitive slime of homogeneity, as in Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. The escape from this in an era of the centralised organisation of capital and a plutocracy of fabulous wealth is a new divine order of capitalist relations. In Forster’s Howards End and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby the promise of being modern is brutally rubbed out by the destructive forces that such power unleashes.

Citation

Greenslade, W. (2002). 'Will it smash?': Modernity and the fear of falling. In J. Arthurs, & I. H. Grant (Eds.), Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material (15-22). Intellect Books

Publication Date Jan 1, 2002
Peer Reviewed Not Peer Reviewed
Pages 15-22
Book Title Crash Cultures: Modernity, Mediation and the Material
ISBN 9781841500713
Keywords modernity, car crash, falling
Public URL https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/1082891
Publisher URL http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4158/