Title: Governing consumption
First published: 1999
Description: "Governing Consumption challenges anew the underlying assumptions made by Ian Watt and other, recent influential scholars about the origins of the eighteenth-century English novel. By examining archival materials, and developing a broad historical and critical discussion, James Cruise places the fiction of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne within the framework of consumer capitalism, the existing market for narrative fiction, and a developing culture of needs and wants.

He thereby argues that commercialization and the dynamic of its demand-based economy helped to shape the cultural processes by which the novel became a discursively rich, character-centered genre. Paradoxically, however, each of these "realistic" novelists, other than Sterne, failed in his attempt to erect character as a moral buffer against the suspense of a commerically driven world."--BOOK JACKET.
Subjects: History, Consumption (Economics) in literature, Authors and readers, Consumption (Economics), Capitalism and literature, Suspense in literature, History and criticism, Marxist criticism, Books and reading, Narration (Rhetoric), English fiction, Characters and characteristics in literature, Literature, modern, history and criticism, 18th century
Places: Great Britain
Time periods: 18th century
LC classification: PR858.C25 C78 1999