Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Brita... - 9780521828482

Fiction, Famine, and the Rise of Economics in Victorian Britain and IrelandAuthor(s): Gordon Bigelow\nFormat: Hardback\nPublisher: Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom\nImprint: Cambridge University Press\nISBN-13: 9780521828482, 978-0521828482\nSynopsis\nWe think of economic theory as a scientific speciality accessible only to experts, but Victorian writers commented on economic subjects with great interest. Gordon Bigelow focuses on novelists Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell and compares their work with commentaries on the Irish famine [tel]. Bigelow argues that at this moment of crisis the rise of economics depended substantially on concepts developed in literature. These works all criticized the systematized approach to economic life that the prevailing political economy proposed. Gradually the romantic views of human subjectivity, described in the novels, provided the foundation for a new theory of capitalism based on the desires of the individual consumer. Bigelow's .