Irene Perciali, a Comparative Literature Ph.D. candidate, is completing a dissertation titled Personifying Capitalism: Economic Imagination, the Novel, and the Entrepreneur. This interdisciplinary study in narrative form develops a new and unexplored connection between literature and economics through character and point of view. In contrast to critical traditions that stress capitalism’s depersonalizing effects, Perciali shows that novels written during transitions to capitalism unexpectedly foreground a particular personality: the charismatic, all-powerful, but also profoundly inscrutable entrepreneur. Focusing on the novels of Balzac and Faulkner, two authors writing during moments of economic modernization, Perciali argues that the transition to capitalism is not represented mimetically in the novel, but is conceived narratively by novelists and economists before it becomes the historical reality we now take it for.