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

by Catherine Gallagher (Author)
Key Phrases: marginal utilitarians, comparative anthropologists, marginal utility theory, George Eliot, Hard Times, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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 )

Review
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 )

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (March 10, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691136300
• ISBN-13: 978-0691136301
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #82,984 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The New Economic Criticism meets Victorian Britain, January 3, 2007

By	Wildeguy "wildeguy2000" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel (Hardcover)

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.