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Lee Erickson. The Economy of Literary Form: English Literature and the Industrialization of Publishing, 1800-1550. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. r996. Pp. xii+219. $35.00.
John 0. Jordan and Robert L. Patten, eds. Literature on the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices. New York: Cambridge UP, 1995. PP. xiv+338. $64.95.
David Kaufmann. The Business of Common Life: Novels and Classical Economics Between Revolution and Reform. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xii+196. $35-00.
Current interdisciplinary configurations in a variety of field studies, including both romanticism and the "long centuries" that overlap the traditional romantic period, answer the New-Historicist imperative to contextualize by recognizing that history is a set of discursive practices contested by literature, economics, and other fields that make claims to referentiality and social intervention. As David Kaufmann puts the case, "certain historically important novels . . . constitute parallel contributions to the project of framing, expressing, and suppressing the needs generated by the development of British commercial modernity" (Business of Common Life 4-5). Lee Erickson argues that "literature is greatly influenced by market pressures, and that literary history is greatly affected by economic history" (Economy of Literary Form ro). John Jordan and Robert Patten assert that "publishing history, however much it starts with physical products, will in the end have to incorporate . . . ideologies and social formations that privileged print culture (and] events that lent themselves to verbal formulation and disseminations (news, legislation, gossip, and controversy)" (Literature on the Marketplace ia). For romanticism, the dialogue between literature and economics is incisive because so much economic theory and practice developed in the decades following the French Revolution (including, arguably, the Adam Smith of the popular capitalist imagination) and because that development was influenced by literary figures and periodicals. The three books I review here take distinctive approaches to the role of economics and political economy in romantic, or lgth-century, literary criticism.
David Kaufmann's Business of Common Life explores the "common horizon" that allows an understanding of "the articulation between the novel and political economics, the relation in difference that binds them together and keeps them apart" (16). Lee Erickson, in The Economy of Literary Form, argues that the meanings ascribed to formal structures of English literature in the first half of the...