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Last year, Wilhelm Fink published the dissertation of Dr Philippe Roepstorff-Robiano (Gender and Diversity) under the title  (Credit Fictions: Literary Realism and the Art of Recounting One’s Debts).

Kreditfiktionen

Credit is generally regarded as a neutral transaction that serves to link economic actors as efficiently and profitably as possible. In the realist narrative literature of the nineteenth century, however, a very different picture emerges: credit fictions by authors such as Honoré de Balzac, Gustave Flaubert, George Eliot, Gottfried Keller or Herman Melville present credit as fiction that generates social friction and conflict and transforms reality itself into a sellable commodity. Thus, texts of realism crystallise knowledge of the ontological, epistemological and social dislocations of the debt economy.

Review

Roepstorff-Robiano received praise for his book in the : "The industrial revolution appeared to contemporaries as a material transformation of the external world, which with railways, large cities and factories gave rise to the proletariat as a new actor. Like a sniffer dog, Roepstorff-Robiano sets out on the trail that leads to the other side of this transformation, to the world of debt, ruin, stock market crashes and bankruptcies, pawnbrokers and exchange transactions. What interests him about the Parisian dandy is not just the casual neckerchief or the ice cream he sips at the Café Procope, but above all how he manages to keep his bills unpaid."

• Title: Kreditfiktionen. Der literarische Realismus und die Kunst, Schulden zu erzählen
• Author: Philippe Roepstorff-Robiano
• Publisher: Wilhelm Fink
• ISBN: 9783770565016