Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720-1850

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.

Dr Richard Adelman is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex. He received his PhD in English from the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York and has been a Visiting Fellow at the Universities of Edinburgh and Freiburg. He is the author of Idleness, Contemplation and the Aesthetic, 1750-1830, published by Cambridge University Press in 2011, as well as of a number of essays on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Dr. Catherine Packham holds a PhD in English Literature from University of Cambridge (2002). Since 2013 she has been Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Sussex, and is also Director of Student Experience for the School of English. She is author of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), as well as many articles on eighteenth-century literature, philosophy and political economy. Her current monograph project, for which she was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2012-13, is ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy’.