The economy of character : novels, market culture, and the business of inner meaning
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The economy of character : novels, market culture, and the business of inner meaning
University of Chicago Press, 1998
- : cloth : alk. paper
- : pbk. : alk. paper
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. 267-307) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
At the start of the 18th century, literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. However, this text shows how, by the 19th century, characters in books became identified with the reader, as friends with whom they empathized. The story of this shift in meaning is usually told in terms of the "rise of the individual", but this text proposes an alternative solution. Elaborating a "pragmatics of character" it shows how readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly-commmercialized social relations. Ranging from Defoe and Smollett to Burney and Austen, this account should interest those with a concern for the inner workings of consumer culture and the history of emotions.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction: Recognizing Characters Pt. 1: The Economies of Characteristic Writing 1: Fleshing Out Characters 2: Fictions of Social Circulation, 1742-1782 Pt. 2: Inside Stories 3: "Round" Characters and Romantic-Period Reading Relations 4: Agoraphobia and Interiority in Frances Burney's Fiction 5: Jane Austen and the Social Machine Conclusion: The Real Thing and the "Work" of Literature in Nineteenth-Century Culture Notes Index
by "Nielsen BookData"
