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In the opening pages of his magisterial Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), economist Thomas Piketty poses the question that made his book one of the most widely read and hotly debated works of economic history in recent memory: “What,” he wonders, “do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?” In search of an answer, Piketty turns to economic theory and to statistics, but also, strikingly, to the novels of Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac – authors who, as he puts it, “grasped the hidden contours of wealth and its inevitable implications for the lives of men and women… with a verisimilitude and evocative power that no statistical or theoretical analysis can match.” This year, the Graduate Forum on the Novel follows Piketty’s lead, inviting papers that address the theme of “Novel Economies.” What lessons can we draw from the novel about the ways the economy has shaped and continues to shape human experience? And what can we learn from economics about the lives of the novel? Does the novel today retain its special power to evoke economic existence – and if so, what might it have to say about capital in the twenty-first century?For centuries, the novel has had multifarious ties with the economic system, both by representing economic relations and by actively shaping market values. The emergence of the novel went hand in hand with the emergence of modern society and its new economic forms, industries and circulation of goods. Today, with easier access to producing and consuming fiction, new questions arise regarding the economic power of narratives. What insights can be drawn from reconsidering the entangled histories of the novel and modern capitalism? What formal continuities and discontinuities might obtain between the world of literature and the world economy? And how do the new economic phenomena variously named neoliberalism, post-Fordism, and cognitive capitalism shape contemporary novel-writing and novel-reading?

This forum welcomes papers on any aspect of the relationship between economics and the novel, from all periods, national literatures, and methodological positions. A few among many possible topics include:

Please send a 200-word abstract to Ella Elbaz at eelbaz@stanford.edu and Marianne Kaletzky at kaletzky@berkeley.edu by 5:00 PM on Friday, March 4, 2016.