Political Economy and the Novel

Political Economy and the Novel: A Literary History of Homo Economicus provides a transhistorical account of homo economicus (economic man), demonstrating this figures significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smiths seminal texts Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations and Henry Fieldings A History of Tom Jones, this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the homo economicus model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austens Sanditon; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and Mrs Dalloways exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and DonDeLillos Cosmopolis. Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.