Realism’s Reputations, Financialized Whiteness

Abstract

This essay uses the legal rearticulation of reputation as white heteropatriarchal property in an “Imperial Jim Crow” United States to piece apart the preoccupation with characters’ reputations in realist fiction. It focuses on two later-nineteenth-century arenas of what property theorist and legal scholar K-Sue Park has called the “generative dynamics” of racial capitalism: new markets in private commercial credit and the socio-legal (re)production of reputation. In so doing, the essay unearths realism’s invisiblized generic presupposition that the idea of reputations that help create modern literary characters are a neutral or self-evident category of experience.