eBook

The body economic

Gallagher, Catherine

2006,2009,2005

Overview

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.

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Subject: 19th century / Allegory / An Essay on the Principle of Population / Behavioral economics / Body, Human, in literature / BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economics / Theory / Calculation / Cambridge University Press / Capitalism / Charles Darwin / Charles Dickens / Classical economics / Commodity / Corn Laws / Criticism / Daniel Deronda / David Ricardo / Death in literature / Dichotomy / Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 / Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870 -- Knowledge -- Economics / Economic conditions / Economics / Economics -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century / Economics in literature / Eliot, George, 1819-1880 / Eliot, George, 1819-1880 -- Knowledge -- Economics / English fiction / English fiction -- 19th century -- History and criticism / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / Ethics / European / Felicific calculus / Fertility / Food security / George Eliot / Great Britain / Great Britain -- Economic conditions -- 19th century / Hedonism / History / HISTORY / Europe / General / History and criticism / Homo economicus / Human body in literature / Industrial society / Infanticide / Intellectual history / Irony / Jeremy Bentham / John Stuart Mill / Knowledge / Labor theory of value / Laborer / Language & Literature / LITERARY CRITICISM / LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh / Literature / Malthusianism / Marginal utility / Misery (novel) / Narrative / Neoclassical economics / Novel / Novelist / Oxford University Press / Pain and pleasure / Political economy / Primitive culture / Princeton University Press / Prose / Psychology / Public lecture / Rate of profit / Relative value (economics) / Rhetoric / Ricardian economics / Romanticism / Scarcity (social psychology) / Scenes of Clerical Life / Senses and sensation in literature / Skepticism / Social science / Social theory / Superiority (short story) / Supply (economics) / The dismal science / The Wealth of Nations / Theories of Surplus Value / Theory / Theory of value (economics) / Thomas Robert Malthus / Thought / Utilitarianism / Wealth / Writing
• ISBN: 0691123586, 1400826845, 0691136300, 9780691136301, 9780691123585, 9781400826841