The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning

Abstract

At the start of the 18th century, literary 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.

Cite this

Laura Mandell, Deidre Shauna Lynch (2003). The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Studies in Romanticism. https://doi.org/10.2307/25601633

@article{laura2003the,
  title  = {The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning},
  author = {Mandell, Laura and Lynch, Deidre Shauna},
  year   = {2003},
  journal = {Studies in Romanticism},
  doi    = {10.2307/25601633}
}

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