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This project describes strategies presented in the fiction of three American novelists which alter our relationship to the epistemological codes of modernity, standards in which we are implicated by a vast network of cultural assumptions and institutional apparatuses. Such confinement within an ethical hegemony—a system permitting only a limited range of acceptable conduct, contemplation, and resistance in both public and private spheres—restricts the bounds not only of what can be practiced but also of what can be safely thought. This system I identify as the epistemology of modernity and, ushered in by the advent of modernization, capitalist relations, and the contemporary continuation of enlightenment reason against which any form of expression must situate itself either in opposition or corroboration. Because divergence is permitted to a certain degree, the possibility of epistemological shifting cannot be achieved by outward participation in such a system and thus must be perceptual: achieved through mentality and self-awareness. The strategies involve a shift in epistemological and thus ethical relations to modernity. Briefly, for Nabokov, it is the ridding of focus on the self; for Pynchon, comprehending the influences of totality; and for Morrison, the depiction of the always-othered non-self rather than one reduced to normative social assumptions and interpretive practices. More specifically, each author offers a particular set of insights on which to build. The project at which most of Nabokov’s (1899-1977) written work is aimed involves the generation, almost separate from the fabric of reality, of a purely aesthetic world. While much of his project is (at worst) doomed to fail or (at best) susceptible to the inevitably invasive material of the real, it remains useful in seeing what potential arises when an imaginative mind consciously attempts to work outside of and resist established systems. Pynchon (b. 1937), on the other hand, is far more rooted in t

The recent boom in the “history of capitalism” has neglected one of the most noted and maligned features of its subject: the connection between capitalism and inequality. To address this gap, this dissertation develops and employs the concept of “economic impunity.” It argues that impunity is a function of three variables acting with the sphere of the economy, each of which changed over time even as the structure of the economy itself changed. The first variable is prosecutorial discretion, whether contingent and corrupt or institutionalized in the limits of jurisprudence. The second is technical knowledge, as financial instruments became increasingly esoteric and economic theory became increasingly formalized across the eighteenth century. The third is international mobility, of both capital and its owners, since European capital markets integrated sooner and more thoroughly than markets for land, labor, or commodities. To test this approach, this dissertation uses documents from twenty-three archives in four countries to analyze the disparity between the increasing complexity of international financial instruments and the simultaneously limited scope of securities regulation in Britain and France to argue that the Financial Revolution witnessed the first expansion of economic impunity from the sovereign to the technical managers of capital, culminating in the world’s first international financial crisis in 1720. The second chapter shows how eighteenth century economic thought tried to solve the conceptual and political problems this crisis raised. The third chapter uses the financial records of the speculator Étienne Clavière to illustrate the normal workings of eighteenth century finance and how that systems came apart during the French Revolution, turning impunity into a nationalized and politicized attribute. The fourth chapter investigates the revolutionary interregnum through a pair of case studies in Dublin and Strasbourg. The final chapter shows how interna