Representation of the Problem-Thematic Unit “Finance” in the Contemporary British Novel

Abstract

The problem-thematic unit “Finance” is outlined in the theoretical work “The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary Fiction” (2018). The importance of this unit is due to the presence of texts in which to understand the worldview of the characters it is important to take into account the socio-economic environment in which the characters live and which affects their behavior. In the novels “NW” (2012) by Zadie Smith, “Other People’s Money” (2011) by Justin Cartwright and “The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim” (2010) by Jonathan Coe, the writers offer a new representation of the image of money, which distances money from the material world and becomes a transcendental value. Monetary processes are perceived as imaginary phenomena that the characters perceive speculatively. This leads to cataclysms and painful experiences arising from the loss of the characters of their work and the total banking crisis. The representation of money in the novels exploits the tendency that contemporary British authors discover trends related to German philosophy and the ideas of Kantianism. Money is not a form of achieving material goods, but a tool that shows that the characters are able to create another virtual world, which can exist as a speculative phenomenon. The presented range of novels confirms the ideas of B. Shalahinov that the sources of philosophical thought of German Romanticism were nourishing both for the Modern period and the Post-postmodern one, in particular exploited in the British post-postmodern novels.