The body economic : life, death, and sensation in political economy and the Victorian novel / Catherine Gallagher.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Gallagher, Catherine.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

English fiction--19th century--History and criticism.

English fiction.

Economics in literature.

Economics--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Economics.

Senses and sensation in literature.

Human body in literature.

Death in literature.

Great Britain--Economic conditions--19th century.

Great Britain.

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870--Knowledge--Economics.

Dickens, Charles.

Eliot, George, 1819-1880--Knowledge--Economics.

Eliot, George.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (222 p.)

Edition:

Course Book

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, c2006.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

The Body Economic revises the intellectual history of nineteenth-century Britain by demonstrating that political economists and the writers who often presented themselves as their literary antagonists actually held most of their basic social assumptions in common. Catherine Gallagher demonstrates that political economists and their Romantic and early-Victorian critics jointly relocated the idea of value from the realm of transcendent spirituality to that of organic "life," making human sensations--especially pleasure and pain--the sources and signs of that value. Classical political economy, this book shows, was not a mechanical ideology but a form of nineteenth-century organicism, which put the body and its feelings at the center of its theories, and neoclassical economics built itself even more self-consciously on physiological premises. The Body Economic explains how these shared views of life, death, and sensation helped shape and were modified by the two most important Victorian novelists: Charles Dickens and George Eliot. It reveals how political economists interacted crucially with the life sciences of the nineteenth century--especially with psychophysiology and anthropology--producing the intellectual world that nurtured not only George Eliot's realism but also turn-of-the-century literary modernism.

Contents:

The Romantics and the political economists

Bioeconomics and somaeconomics : life and sensation in classical political economy

Hard times and the somaeconomics of the early Victorians

The bioeconomics of Our mutual friend

Daniel Deronda and the too much of literature

Malthusian anthropology and the aesthetics of sacrifice in Scenes of clerical life.

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612158025

9781400826841

1400826845

9781282158023

1282158023

9780691123585

0691123586

OCLC:

436342578