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Fiction, famine, and the rise of economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland / Gordon Bigelow

Author
Bigelow, Gordon, 1963-
Additional Titles
Fiction, Famine, & the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain & Ireland
Published
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Physical Description
1 online resource (ix, 229 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).
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Series
Contents
Part I: Origin stories and political economy, 1740-1870 -- History as abstraction -- Value as signification -- Part II: Producing the consumer -- Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House -- Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy -- Toward a social theory of wealth: three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Summary
We think of economic theory as a scientific speciality accessible only to experts, but Victorian writers commented on economic subjects with great interest. Gordon Bigelow focuses on novelists Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell and compares their work with commentaries on the Irish famine (1845-1852). Bigelow argues that at this moment of crisis the rise of economics depended substantially on concepts developed in literature. These works all criticized the systematized approach to economic life that the prevailing political economy proposed. Gradually the romantic views of human subjectivity, described in the novels, provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer. Bigelow's argument stands out by showing how the discussion of capitalism in these works had significant influence not just on public opinion, but on the rise of economic theory itself.
Subject(s)
ISBN
9780511484728 (ebook)
9780521828482 (hardback)
9780521035538 (paperback)
Note
Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 05 Oct 2015).
View MARC record | catkey: 34836252