This book explores the importance of sympathy as a central idea behind Victorian fiction, and an animating principle of novel reading generally. Sympathy, Brigid Lowe argues, deserves a much more important role as both a subject and a guiding principle for literary criticism.

Over the past thirty years, much literary theory has approached literature in general, and Victorian fiction in particular, in a spirit of suspicion. It has tried to purge criticism of the human subject, and of that distinctively human faculty, sympathy. Reading in a contrary, sympathetic mode, Lowe turns the...

The articles in this book have been selected for their importance to the reform movement and for their accessibility to the general reader. Intelligibility is one of the movement's two keystones. "Real economic problems" concern real people, so their analysis must be made intelligible to an educated general public if real democracy is to function.

The second keystone of the post-autistic movement is pluralism. All analysis proceeds on the basis of concepts that admit only a partial view of the economy, thereby predetermining the set of possible conclusions. This requires economists...

No one has challenged the policies of the international financial community as profoundly as Joseph Stiglitz, the former Chief Economist of the World Bank. In controversial speeches made around the world, Stiglitz has undone the conventional wisdom that dominated policy-making at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury Department.

For the first time, Stiglitz's nine most revealing speeches have been gathered together, covering such topics as the failure of shock therapy and transition economics, the limits of capital market liberalization, the myopia of...