- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Princeton University Press (10 Mar 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0691136300
- ISBN-13: 978-0691136301
- Product Dimensions: 23 x 16 x 1.3 cm
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 558,683 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
The Body Economic
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Review
[An] astute and innovative reevaluation of the interplay between fiction and economic thought . . . [The Body Economic] represents a major contribution to literary studies and intellectual history. -- Margot Finn, Journal of Victorian Culture
In a stunningly innovative gesture, Gallagher points out that the thin-blooded political economists and the warm-hearted Romantic organicists of early nineteenth-century Britain had a good deal more in common than is generally supposed. -- Terry Eagleton, Field Day Review
Gallagher's brilliance as an intellectual historian has always resided in her ability to show us how ideas that look different are really alike, and how ideas we tend to lump together are really different. . . . The Body Economic . . . is a gift to the intelligence of every student of nineteenth-century culture. -- Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Nineteenth-Century Literature
[B]rings the history of economics into the heart of modern literature and literary theory, showing how much modernism's anti-bourgeois presentation of sex owed to a complex century-long debate about wealth and poverty. It is a rare achievement. -- Gordon Bigelow, Modernism/modernity
Many of Gallagher's local observations and textual analyses are stunningly perceptive and original. . . . Gallagher's treatments of the four novels she examines in detail are also complex and rewarding. Her analysis of Daniel Deronda, which turns on the resemblance between Jevon's marginal utility formula and Eliot's exploration of Gwendolen's and Elit's storries about being redundant--'a final increment' that can never be as desirable as its predecessors--is a tour de force that illuminates the novel in fascinating ways. -- "Victorian Studies
With admirable economy and a clear sense of purpose, The Body Economic explores and collapses the gulf popularly held to exist between the values and mindsets of post-Enlightenment political economists, represented here by Bentham and Malthus, and those of nineteenth-century imaginative novelists, here represented in the mid-Victorian phase by Dickens, and in the late, by George Eliot. . . . [An] original and considerable accomplishment. -- "Dickens Quarterly
In her commanding and authoritative new study Catherine Gallagher['s] . . . The Body Economic will doubtless become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex lines of affiliation and resistance between economic theory and the literary text in the mid-Victorian period. -- Roger Ebbatson, Modern Language Review
[This] is an innovative and provocative book, brimming with fresh insights. . . . Gallagher's use of political economy to explain the most puzzling features of Dickens's novel is inspirational, and it will likely become a model for future studies. -- Silvana Colella, Nineteenth Century Studies
In a stunningly innovative gesture, Gallagher points out that the thin-blooded political economists and the warm-hearted Romantic organicists of early nineteenth-century Britain had a good deal more in common than is generally supposed. -- Terry Eagleton, Field Day Review
Gallagher's brilliance as an intellectual historian has always resided in her ability to show us how ideas that look different are really alike, and how ideas we tend to lump together are really different. . . . The Body Economic . . . is a gift to the intelligence of every student of nineteenth-century culture. -- Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Nineteenth-Century Literature
[B]rings the history of economics into the heart of modern literature and literary theory, showing how much modernism's anti-bourgeois presentation of sex owed to a complex century-long debate about wealth and poverty. It is a rare achievement. -- Gordon Bigelow, Modernism/modernity
Many of Gallagher's local observations and textual analyses are stunningly perceptive and original. . . . Gallagher's treatments of the four novels she examines in detail are also complex and rewarding. Her analysis of Daniel Deronda, which turns on the resemblance between Jevon's marginal utility formula and Eliot's exploration of Gwendolen's and Elit's storries about being redundant--'a final increment' that can never be as desirable as its predecessors--is a tour de force that illuminates the novel in fascinating ways. -- "Victorian Studies
With admirable economy and a clear sense of purpose, The Body Economic explores and collapses the gulf popularly held to exist between the values and mindsets of post-Enlightenment political economists, represented here by Bentham and Malthus, and those of nineteenth-century imaginative novelists, here represented in the mid-Victorian phase by Dickens, and in the late, by George Eliot. . . . [An] original and considerable accomplishment. -- "Dickens Quarterly
In her commanding and authoritative new study Catherine Gallagher['s] . . . The Body Economic will doubtless become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex lines of affiliation and resistance between economic theory and the literary text in the mid-Victorian period. -- Roger Ebbatson, Modern Language Review
[This] is an innovative and provocative book, brimming with fresh insights. . . . Gallagher's use of political economy to explain the most puzzling features of Dickens's novel is inspirational, and it will likely become a model for future studies. -- Silvana Colella, Nineteenth Century Studies
Product Description
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.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful
The New Economic Criticism meets Victorian Britain
4 Jan 2007
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Gallagher attempts to organize British Victorian novels and economic criticism with two well-defined conceptual tools: bioeconomics and somaeconomics. The first covers those concerned with looking at Victorian economic writings from the vantage point of life and death (Malthus), while the latter follows the lines of utilitarianism initiated by Bentham and having to do with questions of pleasure and pain. These concepts are applied to the developments (and rejections) of political economy over the span of the XIXth century. What was most helpful to me is her use of these concepts in relation to her readings of Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (bioeconomic) and Hard Times (somaeconomic) while comparing these novels to the work of John Ruskin (Munera Pulveris,1871 is used to help elucidate Dickens's last novel Our Mutual Friend).
Gallagher has a great skill in combining her grasp of theory in both economics and literature to her sound readings of Malthus, Ricardo, Ruskin, Dickens, and Eliot. There are other treats as well. Throughout the book she includes excellent observations on other writers (i.e. Herbert Spencer) that generally don't receive much attention. Gallagher states in her introduction that students of literature (esp. from the early XXthc. to the present) have generally overlooked the great political economists of the XIXth century in part because of the "packaging" of their thought as ideological, irrelevant, or simply useless. Such labels should never prevent us from engaging with these texts. This practice can be noted even in editing practices, where little or no information is given about economic issues that determine the outcome of realist novels. Here I would signal a great exception in some British editing practices, esp. those influenced by Ian Small. Today we can no longer afford to dismiss economic thought from our analyses (nor should we have in the past!) of literary works and certainly not from our editing practices. To do so is essentially to misread, or to cause to misread, and thereby to treat the Victorians unhistorically. Any Victorianist should know this. When I began looking at some of the anthologies from two or more decades ago I find small pieces from Ruskin, Morris, Marx, and Engels. Rarely Smith, Ricardo, or Jevons. The new economic criticism does not ignore these "Other" contributions to the development of economics. Gallagher's readings attempt to go beyond simple models of production, distribution, and consumer economics to consider the effects of other economic thought as well.
Gallagher does not treat the late XIXth century with as much detail as she does the High Victorian period. For those interested in the period following 1871 (the year that marks the shift, the "Marginalist Revolution") I would recommend (for late British) Regenia Gagnier and Ian Small. Walter Benn Michaels (The Gold Standard) is still the best for late XIXth c. American literature and economics. I also highly recommend Gallagher's The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction (1988) which will provide a broader context for The Body Economic.
Gallagher has a great skill in combining her grasp of theory in both economics and literature to her sound readings of Malthus, Ricardo, Ruskin, Dickens, and Eliot. There are other treats as well. Throughout the book she includes excellent observations on other writers (i.e. Herbert Spencer) that generally don't receive much attention. Gallagher states in her introduction that students of literature (esp. from the early XXthc. to the present) have generally overlooked the great political economists of the XIXth century in part because of the "packaging" of their thought as ideological, irrelevant, or simply useless. Such labels should never prevent us from engaging with these texts. This practice can be noted even in editing practices, where little or no information is given about economic issues that determine the outcome of realist novels. Here I would signal a great exception in some British editing practices, esp. those influenced by Ian Small. Today we can no longer afford to dismiss economic thought from our analyses (nor should we have in the past!) of literary works and certainly not from our editing practices. To do so is essentially to misread, or to cause to misread, and thereby to treat the Victorians unhistorically. Any Victorianist should know this. When I began looking at some of the anthologies from two or more decades ago I find small pieces from Ruskin, Morris, Marx, and Engels. Rarely Smith, Ricardo, or Jevons. The new economic criticism does not ignore these "Other" contributions to the development of economics. Gallagher's readings attempt to go beyond simple models of production, distribution, and consumer economics to consider the effects of other economic thought as well.
Gallagher does not treat the late XIXth century with as much detail as she does the High Victorian period. For those interested in the period following 1871 (the year that marks the shift, the "Marginalist Revolution") I would recommend (for late British) Regenia Gagnier and Ian Small. Walter Benn Michaels (The Gold Standard) is still the best for late XIXth c. American literature and economics. I also highly recommend Gallagher's The Industrial Revolution of English Fiction (1988) which will provide a broader context for The Body Economic.
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