Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland
Title | Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland PDF eBook |
Author | Gordon Bigelow |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 246 |
Release | 2003-11-20 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1139440853 |
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.
Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany
Title | Victorian Women Writers and the Other Germany PDF eBook |
Author | Linda Hughes |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 305 |
Release | 2022-06-09 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1009080776 |
Shedding new light on the alternative, emancipatory Germany discovered and written about by progressive women writers during the long nineteenth century, this illuminating study uncovers a country that offered a degree of freedom and intellectual agency unheard of in England. Opening with the striking account of Anna Jameson and her friendship with Ottilie von Goethe, Linda K. Hughes shows how cultural differences spurred ten writers' advocacy of progressive ideas and provided fresh materials for publishing careers. Alongside well-known writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, Michael Field, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Vernon Lee – this study sheds light on the lesser-known writers Mary and Anna Mary Howitt, Jessie Fothergill, and the important Anglo-Jewish lesbian writer Amy Levy. Armed with their knowledge of the German language, each of these women championed an extraordinarily productive openness to cultural exchange and, by approaching Germany through a female lens, imported an alternative, 'other' Germany into English letters.
Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
Title | Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel PDF eBook |
Author | Hosanna Krienke |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 245 |
Release | 2021-05-13 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108844847 |
This interdisciplinary study examines how holistic aftercare became a crucial supplement to scientific medicine in nineteenth-century Britain.
Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature
Title | Settler Colonialism in Victorian Literature PDF eBook |
Author | Philip Steer |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 249 |
Release | 2020-01-16 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1108484425 |
A transnational study of how settler colonialism remade the Victorian novel and political economy by challenging ideas of British identity.
Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism
Title | Women, Love, and Commodity Culture in British Romanticism PDF eBook |
Author | Daniela Garofalo |
Publisher | Routledge |
Total Pages | 192 |
Release | 2016-02-17 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 1134778910 |
Offering a new understanding of canonical Romanticism, Daniela Garofalo suggests that representations of erotic love in the period have been largely misunderstood. Commonly understood as a means for transcending political and economic realities, love, for several canonical Romantic writers, offers, instead, a contestation of those realities. Garofalo argues that Romantic writers show that the desire for transcendence through love mimics the desire for commodity consumption and depends on the same dynamic of delayed fulfillment that was advocated by thinkers such as Adam Smith. As writers such as William Blake, Lord Byron, Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Emily Brontë engaged with the period's concern with political economy and the nature of desire, they challenged stereotypical representations of women either as self-denying consumers or as intemperate participants in the market economy. Instead, their works show the importance of women for understanding modern economics, with women's desire conceived as a force that not only undermines the political economy's emphasis on productivity, growth, and perpetual consumption, but also holds forth the possibility of alternatives to a system of capitalist exchange.
Fiction and Economy
Title | Fiction and Economy PDF eBook |
Author | S. Bruce |
Publisher | Springer |
Total Pages | 207 |
Release | 2007-06-15 |
Genre | Literary Criticism |
ISBN | 0230223117 |
This volume brings together essays on the relations between fiction and the economy, all established or emergent scholars from different fields of expertise. The essays range widely in their respective foci, extending beyond purely literary studies to encompass history, the history of language, studies in the visual arts, and philosophy.
Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence
Title | Sexual Restraint and Aesthetic Experience in Victorian Literary Decadence PDF eBook |
Author | Sarah Green |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Total Pages | 283 |
Release | 2023-03-31 |
Genre | Juvenile Nonfiction |
ISBN | 1108831516 |
Sarah Green shows how late Victorian Decadent literature paradoxically treats sexual restraint as healthy and aesthetically productive.