Catherine Gallagher Knihy

Exploring the intersection of political economy and literature in nineteenth-century Britain, this work reveals how economists and their critics shared fundamental social assumptions. Catherine Gallagher argues that both groups shifted the concept of value from spiritual to organic life, emphasizing human sensations like pleasure and pain as central to value. The book reinterprets classical political economy as a form of organicism, positioning the body and its feelings at the core of economic theory, while also highlighting the physiological foundations of neoclassical economics.

Scholars have only recently discovered that the human body itself has a history. Not only has it been perceived, interpreted, and represented differently in different epochs, but it has also been lived differently, brought into being within widely dissimilar material cultures, subjected to various technologies and means of control, and incorporated into different rhythms of production and consumption, pleasure and pain. The eight articles in this volume support, supplement, and explore the significance of these insights. They belong to a new historical endeavor that derives partly from the crossing of historical with anthropological investigations, partly from social historians' deepening interest in culture, partly from the thematization of the body in modern philosophy (especially phenomenology), and partly from the emphasis on gender, sexuality, and women's history that large numbers of feminist scholars have brought to all disciplines.

Two literary scholars focus on five central aspects of the literary critical theory: recurrent use of anecdotes, preoccupation with the nature of representations, fascination with the history of the body, sharp focus on neglected details, and skeptical analysis of ideology.