The New Economic Criticism

This is a pathbreaking work which develops a new form of economic analysis. This collection brings together 27 essays by influential literary and cultural historians as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics.

This collection brings together twenty-seven essays by influential literary and cultural historians, as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics. Contributors include: Jean-Joseph Goux, Marc Shell. This is a pathbreaking work which develops a new form of economic analysis. It will appeal to economists and literary theorists with an interest beyond the narrower confines of their subject.

Introduction 1 Taking account of the New Economic Criticism: an historical Introduction PART I Language and money 2 The issue of representation 3 "I talk to everybody in their own way": Defoe's economies of identity 4 Buying into signs: money and semiosis in eighteenth-century German language theory 5 Cash, check, or charge? PART II Critical economics 6 Dominant economic metaphors and the postmodern subversion of the Subject 7 The toggling sensibility: formalism, self-consciousness, and the improvement of economics 8 The ends of economics PART III Economics of the irrational 9 A portrait of Homo economicus as a Young Man 10 Banishing panic: Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political Economy 11 "Libidinal economics": Lyotard and accounting for the unaccountable PART IV Economic ethics: debts and bondage 12 Montaigne's Essais: metaphors of capital and exchange 13 Sade's ethical economies 14 Fugitive properties PART V Economies of authorship 15 "A taste for more": Trollope's addictive realism 16 Commodifying Tennyson: the historical transformation of "brand loyalty" 17 Smoking, the hack, and the general equivalent PART VI Modernism and markets 18 Who paid for modernism? 19 Rhetoric, science, and economic prophecy: John Maynard Keynes's correspondence with Franklin D.Roosevelt 20 A man is his bonds: The Great Gatsby and deficit spending PART VII Critical exchanges 21 Literary/cultural "Economies," economic discourse, and the question of Marxism 22 Reply to Amariglio and Ruccio's "Literary/cultural 'economies,' economic discourse, and the question of Marxism" 23 Symbolic economics: adventures in the metaphorical marketplace