The History of Financial Advice

《金融建议的历史》第一次深入研究了一种写作类型，这种写作类型积累了大量的读者，并产生了重大的社会和经济影响，但在很大程度上仍被文化和经济史学家以及文学评论家所忽视。正如伦多尔·考尔德（Lendol Calder）在最近出版的《牛津消费史手册》（Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption, 2012）中所写的那样，“通过金融建议帮助人们理解金钱的印刷文化”仍在“等待着它的历史学家”，尽管事实上“关于金钱的关注——如何获得金钱、如何储蓄、如何投资、如何投资、如何消费——可能在过去200年里比宗教以外的任何其他主题都更畅销”。该项目描绘了个人理财建议文学在英国和美国发展的历史，从18世纪的私人信件和家庭理财建议手册，到19世纪金融新闻和投资建议的出现，再到20世纪末和21世纪初流行的金融小说、生活方式指南和博客的激增。利用文学和文化研究的修辞和叙事研究方法，该项目调查了金融建议作品如何成功地吸引了读者的欲望和幻想，尽管缺乏证据证明这些作品提出的投资策略的有效性。利用被称为“文化经济”的社会科学，该项目还考虑了金融建议如何塑造公众对金融市场的看法和活动，从而使该类型积极地创造和重塑了它所建议的市场。该项目团队将通过研究和撰写首份全面研究英国和美国金融咨询历史的报告，为大众与金融互动的学术研究做出重大贡献，该研究从18世纪早期的金融革命开始，一直持续到现在。团队成员将在文化、经济和商业历史领域的著名国际会议上与其他研究人员分享这项研究。项目团队还将与金融服务行业代表、金融监管机构、教育工作者、慈善机构和政策制定者建立已建立的关系，在研讨会上分享想法，提供培训课程，并在金融知识、监管政策和专业实践方面开展合作。作为该项目的一部分，该团队将收集、编目和注释金融建议文献档案。这些档案的收购将由英国首个专门的金融写作图书馆资助，该图书馆由金融教育慈善机构迪达斯科（Didasko）运营，该图书馆还将为这些收藏提供一个永久的住所，供学生、学者、行业学员和公众查阅，并由项目团队制作的一份专门编写的指南提供帮助。这项研究的主要发现还将通过制作一部短片，并在网上提供给公众，短片的暂定名为“三个世纪的金融建议能教会你什么”。《金融建议的历史》不仅将成为学术领域的一个里程碑，而且将对金融“圈内人”和“圈外人”思考和参与市场的方式产生重大影响。

'The History of Financial Advice' provides the first thorough study of a genre of writing that has amassed a huge readership, and had major social and economic effects, but which has remained largely neglected by cultural and economic historians and by literary critics. As Lendol Calder writes in the recent Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (2012), 'the print culture that helped people make sense of money through financial advice', still 'awaits its historian', despite the fact that 'concerns about money - how to get it, how to save it, how to invest, multiply and spend it - have likely sold more books in the last two hundred years than any other subject after religion'.The project charts the history of personal financial advice literature as it has developed in Britain and the United States, ranging from the private letters and domestic advice manuals of the eighteenth century to the emergence of financial journalism and investment advice in the nineteenth century to the proliferation of popular financial novels, lifestyle guides and blogs in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Drawing on approaches to the study of rhetoric and narrative central to literary and cultural studies, the project investigates how works of financial advice have succeeded in appealing to the desires and fantasies of their readers, despite a lack of evidence for the efficacy of the investment strategies such works propound. Making use of the strand of social science known as 'Cultural Economy', the project also considers how financial advice has shaped public perceptions of, and activities in, financial markets, such that the genre has actively made and remade the very markets about which it advises.The project team will make a major contribution to the scholarship on popular interactions with finance by researching and writing the first comprehensive study of the history of financial advice in Britain and the United States, beginning in the Financial Revolution of the early eighteenth century and moving through to the present. Members of the team will share this research with fellow researchers at prominent international conferences in the fields of cultural, economic and business history. The project team will also build on established relationships with representatives of the financial services industry, as well as financial regulators, educators, charities and policy makers, to share ideas in workshops, provide training sessions and collaborate in the development of initiatives in financial literacy, regulatory policy and professional practice. As part of the project, the team will collect, catalogue and annotate an archive of financial advice literature. Acquisition of the archive will be funded by the UK's first dedicated library of financial writing, run by Didasko the financial education charity, which will also provide a permanent home for the collection, where it will be available for consultation by students, academics, industry trainees and the general public, aided by a purpose-written guide produced by the project team. The key findings of the research will also be made readily and widely accessible to the public through the production of a short film to the made available online, with the working title 'What Three Centuries of Financial Advice Can Teach You'.'The History of Financial Advice' will both mark a landmark in scholarship and achieve a major impact on the ways in which financial 'insiders' and 'outsiders' alike think about and participate in markets.