Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel

The evolution of the novel in the context of the language and concepts of contemporary economic debate.

Liz Bellamy (Author)

9780521622240, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 23 July 1998

232 pages
23.5 x 16.1 x 2 cm, 0.466 kg

"Bellamy introduces new discourses and genres into the cultural mix from which the novel emerges and reenvisages what these discourses are trying to do..." Modern Philology

British culture underwent radical change in the eighteenth century with the emergence of new literary genres and new discourses of social analysis. As novelists developed new forms of fiction, writers of economic tracts and treatises sought a new language and a conceptual framework to describe the modern commercial state. In Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Liz Bellamy argues that the evolution of the novel in eighteenth-century Britain needs to be seen in the context of the discursive conflict between economics and more traditional systems of social analysis. In a series of fresh readings of a wide range of novels, Bellamy shows how the novel contributed to the debate over public and private virtues and had to negotiate between commercial and anti-commercial ethics. The resulting choices were crucial in determining the structure as well as the moral content of the novel.

1. Introduction
Part I. Contexts: 2. The economic context
3. The literary context
Part II. Texts: 4. The mid-eighteenth-century novel
5. The novel of circulation
6. The sentimental novel
7. The Jacobin novel
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK]