Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland

Informationen zum Autor Gordon Bigelow is Assistant Professor of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. His work has appeared in the journals ELH and New Orleans Review and in the volume Reclaiming Gender: Transgressive Identities in 19th-century Ireland (1999). Zusammenfassung At the time of the Irish famine! novels by Dickens and Gaskell! and commentaries on the famine! introduced a new theory of individual expression! which gradually replaced the older ideas of political economy! and became the foundation for modern concepts of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Origin Stories and Political Economy, 1740 1870: 1. History as abstraction; 2. Value as signification; Part II. Producing the Consumer: 3. Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House; 4. Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy; 5. Toward a social theory of wealth: three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Zusammenfassung
At the time of the Irish famine, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, and commentaries on the famine, introduced a new theory of individual expression, which gradually replaced the older ideas of political economy, and became the foundation for modern concepts of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Origin Stories and Political Economy, 1740 1870: 1. History as abstraction; 2. Value as signification; Part II. Producing the Consumer: 3. Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House; 4. Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy; 5. Toward a social theory of wealth: three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.