The Body Economic

Reviews / Votes

[An] astute and innovative reevaluation of the interplay between fiction and economic thought ... [The Body Economic] represents a major contribution to literary studies and intellectual history. -- Margot Finn, Journal of Victorian Culture In a stunningly innovative gesture, Gallagher points out that the thin-blooded political economists and the warm-hearted Romantic organicists of early nineteenth-century Britain had a good deal more in common than is generally supposed. -- Terry Eagleton, Field Day Review Gallagher's brilliance as an intellectual historian has always resided in her ability to show us how ideas that look different are really alike, and how ideas we tend to lump together are really different... The Body Economic ... is a gift to the intelligence of every student of nineteenth-century culture. -- Rosemarie Bodenheimer, Nineteenth-Century Literature [B]rings the history of economics into the heart of modern literature and literary theory, showing how much modernism's anti-bourgeois presentation of sex owed to a complex century-long debate about wealth and poverty. It is a rare achievement. -- Gordon Bigelow, Modernism/modernity Many of Gallagher's local observations and textual analyses are stunningly perceptive and original... Gallagher's treatments of the four novels she examines in detail are also complex and rewarding. Her analysis of Daniel Deronda, which turns on the resemblance between Jevon's marginal utility formula and Eliot's exploration of Gwendolen's and Elit's storries about being redundant--'a final increment' that can never be as desirable as its predecessors--is a tour de force that illuminates the novel in fascinating ways. -- Victorian Studies With admirable economy and a clear sense of purpose, The Body Economic explores and collapses the gulf popularly held to exist between the values and mindsets of post-Enlightenment political economists, represented here by Bentham and Malthus, and those of nineteenth-century imaginative novelists, here represented in the mid-Victorian phase by Dickens, and in the late, by George Eliot... [An] original and considerable accomplishment. -- Dickens Quarterly In her commanding and authoritative new study Catherine Gallagher['s] ... The Body Economic will doubtless become required reading for anyone seeking to understand the complex lines of affiliation and resistance between economic theory and the literary text in the mid-Victorian period. -- Roger Ebbatson, Modern Language Review [This] is an innovative and provocative book, brimming with fresh insights... Gallagher's use of political economy to explain the most puzzling features of Dickens's novel is inspirational, and it will likely become a model for future studies. -- Silvana Colella, Nineteenth Century Studies