ABSTRACT

This edited collection, Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, aims to address the genealogy and formation of political economy as a knowledge project from 1720 to 1850. Through individual essays on both literary and political economic writers, this volume defines and analyses the formative moves, both epistemological and representational, which proved foundational to the emergence of political economy as a dominant discourse of modernity. The collection also explores political economy’s relation to other discourses and knowledge practices in this period; representation in and of political economy; abstraction and political economy; fictional mediations and interrogations of political economy; and political economy and its ‘others’, including political economy and affect, and political economy and the aesthetic.

Essays presented in this text are at once historical and conceptual in focus, and manifest literary critical disciplinary expertise whilst being of genuinely broad and interdisciplinary interest. Amongst the writers whose work is addressed are: Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, David Hume, Thomas Malthus, Jane Marcet, J. S. Mill, David Ricardo, and Adam Smith. The introduction, by the editors, sets up the conceptual, theoretical and analytical framework explored by each of the essays. The final essay and response bring the concerns of the volume up to date by engaging with current economic and financial realities, by, respectively, showing how an informed and critical history of political economy could transform current economic practices, and by exploring the abundance of recent conceptual art addressing representation and the unpresentable in economic practice.

chapter |20 pages

Introduction

The Formation of Political Economy as a Knowledge Practice

part I|98 pages

Representation and Political Economy

section 1|47 pages

Abstractions

chapter 1|28 pages

“The Visionary Scene Was Lost in Air” 1

Conceptualizing Finance after the South Sea Bubble

chapter 2|18 pages

Insect Nature and Human Political Economy

The Notion of the Population across Natural History and Physiocracy in Enlightenment France

section 2|50 pages

Fictions

chapter 3|18 pages

“Pilfering, and Burning, and Studious Waste”

Food Security and Political Economy in Harriet Martineau’s Cinnamon and Pearls

chapter 4|30 pages

“I Have Tried to Write Truthfully”

Fictions of Science in Women’s Writing of Nineteenth-Century Political Economy

part II|84 pages

Political Economy and Its Others

section 3|36 pages

Vision, Surveillance, and the Corporation

chapter 5|16 pages

Malthus’s Vision

Ekphrasis and Corporate Sovereignty

chapter 6|19 pages

Moral Surveillance after Malthus

section 4|46 pages

Political Economy and Affect

chapter 8|20 pages

The Anxiety of Inheritance

Work and the Impasses of Accumulation in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop

part III|29 pages

Modelling Political Economy Today

section 5|28 pages

Models and Their Consequence

chapter 9|15 pages

From the South Sea Bubble to Modern Finance

The Legacy of Two Eighteenth-Century Economic Ideas

chapter 10|12 pages

Afterword

Modelling the Political Economy in the Twenty-First Century