Money and myths: An exploration of models of value in early 19th-century literature and texts on economy

The main aim of this paper is to show how the concept of money could be treated in literary and in economic writings in the Swedish Age of Romanticism. Three texts — an early poem by Erik Johan Stagnelius and two contemporary essays in economic theory — serve as examples of how, and for which purpose, qualitative and quantitative values could be negotiated in these writings. The study shows that, in the poem, money and profit are treated as inconsistent with such qualitative values as freedom, justice, and joy, whereas the two theoretical essays both make use of different strategies of fictionalization to deal with qualitative and quantitative values in one and the same narration. In this paper, the fictionalization strategies are linked to the paracapitalist approach often to be found in the political and economic theories in the Romantic period. From the perspective of economy-discourse history, an attempt is made to link the two essays to the German economist and philosopher Adam Müller and his Versuche einer neuen Theorie des Geldes (1816).