Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and Ireland [Paperback]

How fiction influenced the movement from old ideas of political economy to modern concepts of capitalism.Before the emergence of modern economics, political economy was a worldly discipline, of interest to readers of novels, and to novelists. At the time of the Irish Famine of 1845 52, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, and 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. Gradually these romantic views of human subjectivity provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer.Before the emergence of modern economics, political economy was a worldly discipline, of interest to readers of novels, and to novelists. At the time of the Irish Famine of 1845 52, novels by Dickens and Gaskell, and 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. Gradually these romantic views of human subjectivity provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer.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.Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Origin Stories and Political Economy, 17401870: 1. History as abstraction; 2. Value as signification; Part II. Producing the Consumer: 3. Market indicators: banking and housekeeping in Bleak House; 4. Esoteric solutions: Ireland and the colonial critique of political economy; 5. Toward a social theory of wealthlãj