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

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.

Author: Catherine Gallagher
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 03/30/2008
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.71lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.30w x 0.53d
ISBN: 9780691136301

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).