Introduction Le statut romanesque de l’argent au xix^e siècle : déconstruction et genèse

Adhesion to economic theories as well as loyalty to the injunctions of Marxist criticism can only provide us with an initial approximation of what the “truth of money” might be. This truth belongs to the novelist. It is necessary to return to the inaugural moment of the novel’s constitution, the eighteenth century, and interrogate the texts which seem external to its logic in order to discover the avenues which will later be explored by novelists in the century of triumphant capitalism.