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Many comedies are instances of 'money on the stage' and not merely because their subject matter revolves around 'filthy lucre'. Numerous features characteristic of the genre serve to illustrate the social expectations geared to money. This being the case, it is possible to write a genre history of (baroque and Enlightenment) comedy in the form of 'social history on a cultural studies basis'. Proceeding from the homology between development and representation structures in comedy and the way money functions, the study essays a reconstruction of the evolution of the genre with special reference to its interrelations with the evolution of a market society.

History, as both literary critics and historians agree, is not a given, but forms itself in specific patterns of thought and the linguistic patterns which realize these modes of thinking. The present volume deveotes itself to history as a written construst by examining the broad spectrum of literary treatments of history from the late enlightenment to the early 21st century and discussing their theoretical and historiographic premisses. The introduction discusses the principal methods and leading aspects of the contemporary debate at the intersection of "literature" and "history". The main body of work then presents a series of chronologically arranged case studies which illuminate both the interplay of historical view and textual procedures and the social function of different forms and genres of historical representation. The volume thus provides a compendium which provides systematic access to a research field which has been rapidly expanding over the last few years in the 20th century, and examines its benefits for both literary studies and the theory of history; as such, it also serves as an introduction to a complex field of research.