Focusing on the transition from political economy to economics, this volume seeks to restore social content to economic abstractions through readings of nineteenth-century British and American literature. The essays gathered here, by new as well as established scholars of literature and economics, link important nineteenth-century texts and histories with present-day issues such as exploitation, income inequality, globalization, energy consumption, property ownership and rent, human capital, corporate power, and environmental degradation. Organized according to key concepts for future research, the collection has a clear interdisciplinary, humanities approach and international reach. These diverse essays will interest students and scholars in literature, history, political science, economics, sociology, law, and cultural studies, in addition to readers generally interested in the Victorian period.

This pathbreaking work analyzes melodrama as not merely a theatrical genre but as a behavioral paradigm of the nineteenth century, manifest in the theater, in literature, and in society. With its familial narratives, depictions of bodily torture, scenes of criminal conduct, expressions of highly charged emotion, and simple themes of good and evil, the melodramatic mode reaffirmed the familial, hierarchical, and public grounds for ethical behavior and identity that characterized eighteenth-century models of social exchange and organization. In these enactments, Radicals and Tories, paupers and newsmen, ladies and prostitutes, and men of letters responded to the effects of a consolidating market culture, especially the emergence of bureaucratic procedures of rationalization, classification, and professionalization.

Focusing on the transition from political economy to economics, this volume seeks to restore social content to economic abstractions through readings of nineteenth-century British and American literature. The essays gathered here, by new as well as established scholars of literature and economics, link important nineteenth-century texts and histories with present-day issues such as exploitation, income inequality, globalization, energy consumption, property ownership and rent, human capital, corporate power, and environmental degradation. Organized according to key concepts for future research, the collection has a clear interdisciplinary, humanities approach and international reach. These diverse essays will interest students and scholars in literature, history, political science, economics, sociology, law, and cultural studies, in addition to readers generally interested in the Victorian period.