Money and Culture

This interdisciplinary collection of twenty-five essays examines the construction of national, social and individual identities in response to money, or the lack of it, and the ways in which such identities are reflected in media as disparate as coins and films, literary texts and museums, autobiographies and architecture. It takes the reader from Roman Britain to the consumer society of twenty-first century Ireland, from the coins of the German Middle Ages to the virtual economies of postmodern America. Money and Culture focuses not only on economic aspects of cultures but also on specific cultural forms to deal with money, and reminds us of the symbiotic relationship between money and culture.