Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century

Ayse Celikkol
Additional contact information
Ayse Celikkol: Bilkent University

in OUP Catalogue from Oxford University Press

Abstract: Romances of Free Trade offers a new account of the cultural work of romance in nineteenth-century Britain. Celikkol argues that novelists and playwrights employed this genre to represent a radically new historical formation: the emergence of the global free-market economy. In previous centuries, the British state had pursued an economic policy that privileged domestic goods over foreign ones. Through the first half of the nineteenth century, liberal economists maintained that commodity traffic across national borders should move outside the purview of the state, and their position gained increasing support. Amid economic transformation, Britons pondered the effects of vertiginous circulation. Would patriotic attachment to the homeland dissolve along with the preference for domestic goods? What would be the fate of the nation and the empire if commerce were uncontrollable? The literary genre of romance, characterized by protagonists who drift in lawless spaces, played a privileged role in addressing such pressing questions. From the figure of the smuggler to episodic plot structure, romance elements in fiction and drama narrated sprawling global markets and the fluidity of capital. Exploring works by Walter Scott, Harriet Martineau, Charlotte Bronte, Charles Dickens and their lesser-known contemporaries, this book historicizes globalization as it traces the sense of dissolving borders and the perceived decline of national sovereignty back into the nineteenth century. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/literature/9780199769001/toc.html

Date: 2011
ISBN: 9780199769001
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxp:obooks:9780199769001

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://ukcatalogue.o ... uct/9780199769001.do

Access Statistics for this book

More books in OUP Catalogue from Oxford University Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Economics Book Marketing ().