The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel - Hardcover

Gallagher, Catherine

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691123586 ISBN 13: 9780691123585

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2005

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Back Cover

"A marvelous book. No other literary critic writes with such an assured and lucid grasp of both the novel and the history of economic theory."--James Eli Adams, Cornell University

"This is a stunning and extremely important book whose scholarship is deep and sound from start to finish. Gallagher offers a fundamentally original and revisionary understanding of Victorian culture and of modernist literature as well."--George Levine, Rutgers University

"Well-researched, clearly argued, and both original and provocative."--Patrick Brantlinger, Indiana University

About the Author

Catherine Gallagher is Eggers Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her books include The Industrial Reformation of English Fiction, Nobody's Story, The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, and Practicing New Historicism (with Stephen Greenblatt).

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0691123586
• ISBN 13: 9780691123585
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224