Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of Homo Economicus

ISBN-13: 9783030068349 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 283 str.

Sarah Comyn

Spis treści

1. Introduction

Value and Representation

The Character of Homo Economicus

The Empathic Imagination

The Narrative of Homo Economicus

2. Chapter Two: The Contested Birth of Homo Economicus

The Crisis of Value and the Literary Discourse

The Critical Enclosure of the Text

The Division of Labour and Speculative Rhetoric

Self-improvement and the Impartial Spectator

3. Chapter Three: The Speculative World of Sandition

The Text and the Textual Place

Imagined Economies, Imagined Disorders

Ricardo's Theory of Rent and Modern Sandition

The Comparative Value of Austen and Ricardo

4. Chapter Four: A Marginal Life

The Optative Mood: Residues of a Past Life

A Parvenu Civilisation

The Spectral Presence of Homo Economicus

5. Chapter Five: The Compulsion to Consume

The Specificity of the General

Historians of Genre

Fragments of Empire

The (In)consumable and Inconsolable

6. Chapter Six: The Neoliberal Ideologue

The Political Backdrop to an Economic Revolution

Moral Equilibrium

Contemporary Randian Impulses

7. Chapter Seven: The Asymmetric Prostate

The Ascent of Information Technology

Zeptoseconds and Reading Economic Data

Value and Authenticity

8. Coda

O autorze

Sarah Comyn is Postdoctoral Fellow on the ERC-funded project SouthHem at University College Dublin, Ireland.

Blurb

Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of ‘Homo Economicus’ provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figure’s significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith’s seminal texts – Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations – and Henry Fielding’s A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen’s Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens’ engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloway’s exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.