Author: Bigelow, Gordon [1963- ]
Title: Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland
Description: Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, (2003). orig.boards. x,229 pp, 23x15cm, Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-century Literature and Culture, 40.. Some rubbing. Spine lightly bumped. VG, ¶ Contents: Part I. Origin Stories and Political Economy, 1740-1870: History as abstraction; Value as signification; Part II. Producing the Consumer: Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House; Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy; Toward a social theory of wealth: three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell; Conclusion. ["During the Irish Famine of 1845-52, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, as well as a range of commentaries on the Irish disaster, argued for a new theory of individual expression in opposition to the systemized approach to economic life that political economy proposed. These romantic views of human subjectivity eventually provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer." - Publisher's description]

Keywords: Literary Criticism, Irish Famine, Victorian Fiction, Ireland History, Great Britain, Mrs. Gaskell, Charles Dickens, Historiography, Economics