Speculative society, risk and the crime thriller: The Datchet Diamonds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Victoria Margree
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Social Hierarchies ◽  
Economic Criticism

Marsh’s The Datchet Diamonds (1898) weaves together crime and romance elements with a financial plot concerning stock market speculation. Drawing on New Economic Criticism, this chapter argues that the novel is fascinatingly ambivalent in its treatment of speculation, appearing to condemn it as dishonourable and criminal while surreptitiously endorsing the very risk-taking behaviour on which it relies. The novel’s ‘decent-man-tempted’ protagonist is rendered attractive to readers through his willingness coolly to stare down danger and play the odds, putting him in uncomfortable proximity to the models of criminal masculinity that the text presents. As a crime thriller, The Datchet Diamonds works by soliciting readerly enjoyment of exposure to risk: as such, it reveals the limitations of crime scholarship that has focused too narrowly upon ‘ideologically conservative’ detective fiction, pointing instead to the willingness of readers to identify with transgressor-protagonists, to see laws broken and social hierarchies questioned.

Predicting Stock Market Performance

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Thomas Plieger ◽  
Thomas Grünhage ◽  
Éilish Duke ◽  
Martin Reuter
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Life Stress ◽  
Price Volatility ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Self Report ◽  
Financial Behavior ◽  
Market Simulation ◽  
Stock Market Performance ◽  
Risk Taking Behavior

Abstract. Gender and personality traits influence risk proneness in the context of financial decisions. However, most studies on this topic have relied on either self-report data or on artificial measures of financial risk-taking behavior. Our study aimed to identify relevant trading behaviors and personal characteristics related to trading success. N = 108 Caucasians took part in a three-week stock market simulation paradigm, in which they traded shares of eight fictional companies that differed in issue price, volatility, and outcome. Participants also completed questionnaires measuring personality, risk-taking behavior, and life stress. Our model showed that being male and scoring high on self-directedness led to more risky financial behavior, which in turn positively predicted success in the stock market simulation. The total model explained 39% of the variance in trading success, indicating a role for other factors in influencing trading behavior. Future studies should try to enrich our model to get a more accurate impression of the associations between individual characteristics and financially successful behavior in context of stock trading.

Realism and the Stock Market

2016 ◽  
Vol 70 (4) ◽  
pp. 473-495
Author(s):  
Henry B. Wonham
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Traditional View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Securities Trading

Henry B. Wonham, “Realism and the Stock Market: The Rise of Silas Lapham” (pp. 473–495) William Dean Howells’s The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) is usually approached as a representative text in the American realist mode and an unambiguous expression of Howells’s disdain for—in Walter Benn Michaels’s words—“the excesses of capitalism,” especially as embodied in the novel’s rendering of “the greedy and heartless stock market.” Like many commentators of the period, Howells promoted a traditional view of honest industry against the emerging phenomenon of speculative finance, and yet to read the novel as an allegory of opposition to Wall Street speculation is to oversimplify Howells’s complicated attitudes toward high finance and to make a caricature out of the novel’s treatment of complex economic developments. In this essay, I reassess Silas’s investment career and the novel’s surprisingly dense engagement with the dynamics of securities trading as a form of commerce. Critics such as Michaels and Neil Browne have contended that through Silas’s failed investment career, Howells “attempts to disarticulate…an emergent market ethos,” but as I read the novel this same “market ethos” is inseparable from Howells’s conception of realism and of the vocation of the literary realist.

Police Records

2019 ◽  
pp. 797-819
Author(s):  
Cristina Vatulescu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Media History ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Police Records ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter approaches police records as a genre that gains from being considered in its relationships with other genres of writing. In particular, we will follow its long-standing relationship to detective fiction, the novel, and biography. Going further, the chapter emphasizes the intermedia character of police records not just in our time but also throughout their existence, indeed from their very origins. This approach opens to a more inclusive media history of police files. We will start with an analysis of the seminal late nineteenth-century French manuals prescribing the writing of a police file, the famous Bertillon-method manuals. We will then track their influence following their adoption nationally and internationally, with particular attention to the politics of their adoption in the colonies. We will also touch briefly on the relationship of early policing to other disciplines, such as anthropology and statistics, before moving to a closer look at its intersections with photography and literature.

scholarly journals The Stock Market and Bank Risk-Taking

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio Falato ◽  
David Scharfstein
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Bank Risk

scholarly journals Market shocks and professionals' investment behavior – Evidence from the COVID-19 crash

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Huber ◽  
Juergen Huber ◽  
Michael Kirchler
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Risk Taking ◽  
Investment Behavior ◽  
Controlled Experiments ◽  
Price Expectations ◽  
Market Crashes ◽  
Changes In Risk ◽  
Risk Taking Behavior ◽  
Market Shocks

We investigate how the experience of stock market shocks, such as the COVID-19 crash, influences risk-taking behavior. To isolate changes in risk taking from other factors during stock market crashes, we ran controlled experiments with finance professionals in December 2019 and March 2020. We observe that their investments in the experiment were 12 percent lower in March 2020 than in December 2019, although their price expectations had not changed, and although they considered the experimental asset less risky during the crash than before. Thus, lower investments are driven by higher risk aversion, not by changes in beliefs.

2008 AND ALL THAT: ECONOMICS AND VICTORIAN LITERATURE

2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 217-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nancy Henry
Keyword(s):  
Stock Market ◽  
Interest Rates ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Leveraged Buyouts ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
The Public ◽  
Economic Criticism ◽  
Literature Culture ◽  
Cultural Turn

In their collection of essays,The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics(1999), Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee identified and named a movement in economic literary studies and sought to place it alongside a cultural turn in economics. In their introduction, they offer possible reasons for the proliferation of scholarship in literature, culture, and economics. One is that “the critical pendulum has decidedly swung back toward historicist methods” and away from formalist approaches (3); another is that the 1980s thrust “interest rates, stock market speculation, takeovers, leveraged buyouts, and so on, into the public attention as never before since the 1930s” (4). Today, the proverbial pendulum has swung back toward formalism, and it is now surprising to encounter their comparison of the 1980s to the 1930s because we have become so accustomed to claim that comparison to the 1930s for our own post-2008 economy.

The Retitling of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers in Anglophone and Lusophone Markets

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-194
Author(s):  
Vanessa Lopes Lourenço Hanes
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Great Success ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Issue ◽  
Publication History ◽  
History Of ◽  
International Book ◽  
Book Markets

Agatha Christie's detective fiction has met with great success beyond anglophone markets, having been translated and retranslated in forty-four languages, including Brazilian Portuguese. Christie's ubiquity in popular literature makes the publication history of one of her most highly acclaimed and broadly disseminated novels, originally published as Ten Little Niggers in 1939, especially compelling as a demonstration of postcolonial interconnectivity in international book markets, as publishers followed each other's cues, more or less erratically, in distancing themselves from a thorny cultural issue by rebranding the novel under a series of titles on both sides of the Atlantic.

scholarly journals FREUDIAN TRIPARTITE ON DETECTIVE FICTION: THE TOKYO ZODIAC MURDERS

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-305
Author(s):  
Dina Amelia ◽  
Jepri Daud
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Qualitative Method ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional Character ◽  
The Unconscious ◽  
Her Family

Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychoanalysis developed in the 1940s as mentioned in Barry (2002) was applied to unravel the unconscious psyche of a fictional character in the novel Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Soji Shimada. Tokiko, the villain in the story has been experiencing abusive treatment from her father, stepmother, and stepsisters.  The traumas she has received during her life has led to her decision to commit a well-prepared murder that could not be solved for decades. The qualitative method helps to identify and elaborate every component of the unconscious psyche of the villain, especially the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego in the story. The findings show that Tokiko’s Ego keeps her alive and survive to plan revenge on her family. Meanwhile, her Super-Ego fails to restrain herself from feeding her desire to conduct the vicious murder. Therefore, Tokiko’s Id is responsible for her action which is triggered by her devastating experiences. Her character remains committed and faithful to herself.

scholarly journals Busca el libro! : la intervención de Sherlock Holmes y D'Artagnan en El Club Dumas de Arturo Pérez-Reverte

2008 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 41-47
Author(s):  
Mária Dornbach ◽  
Arturo Pérez-Reverte
Keyword(s):  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Literary Work ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Sherlock Holmes ◽  
Complex Character ◽  
Narrative Space ◽  
Greek Tradition ◽  
Literary Work Of Art ◽  
Narrative Techniques ◽  
Historical References

The essay examines Arturo Pérez-Reverte's novel The Dumas Club. The novel can be categorized as a literary crime story; it maintains the characteristics of traditional detective fiction, but, as the author points out, it also presents the use of refined and complex narrative techniques. Pérez Reverte offers a dizzying array of cultural, literary and historical references, which all carry a metaphoric layer of meaning and expand the narrative space and time of the novel into infinity. Similarly to the Greek tradition and the characteristics of the literature of adventure, defined by Bakhtin, the condensed time and space become the principal motivators for the action. The complex system of symbols, the chronotopical motives and the metatextual references offer different layers of possible interpretations and provide a complex character portrayal. Pérez-Reverte's characters embody Sherlock Holmes and other famous detectives; at the same time, they evoke the classic heroes of The Three Muskateers, and often bear similarities to the author himself, and to important literary predecessors. Each of the 16 chapters of the novel is preceded by a motto taken from a famous literary work of art; these quotations function as an incipit, advancing and, at the same time, reflecting to the most important elements of the chapter.

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