A Romance of Business: Genre, Scarcity, and the Businessman in the American Economic Novel
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The subtitle of Richard Kimball’s novel, Undercurrents of Wall Street, represents the central tension of the American business novel that emerges during the second half of the nineteenth century. The novel calls itself as a “romance of business.” As a romance, there is never any doubt that the story must restore the fortunes lost by the main character when his business fails. As a business narrative, a large part of the text explores the myriad ways in which market conditions prevent his return to profitability. The tension between the desire to make him a wealthy man and the difficulty of making him a successful businessman is the kind of tension that becomes the defining feature of the business novel. These novels, as economic narratives, have a logical commitment to market and resource constraints. But as novels, such texts are also committed to reinforcing the relationship between moral behavior and personal success. These novels reflect a dramatic shift in the conceptual landscape that transformed economics from a science of wealth to a science of scarcity. This conceptual shift is reflected in the structural reorganization of the business world to favor a new class of professional managers. The businessman becomes an important financial technology as well as the central element of economic narratives. The economic novel must be understood as an attempt to reconcile the mathematics and calculation of economics as a rising science of scarcity with the genre constraints of the American romance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".