Economic Humanities: Literature, Culture and Capitalism

This chapter traces the connections and tensions between literature and economics. Economic and literary writing only began to diverge in the eighteenth century, yet there are still many intersections between the two realms, despite the attempts of neoclassical economics to downplay its reliance on metaphors. The chapter then describes how a lot of scholarship has tended to champion literary works that criticize industrial capitalism. In contrast, the New Economic Criticism argued that literary and money are both symbolic systems, suggesting that it is impossible for literature to resist the logic of the market. The conclusion maps out some possible future directions for research to develop a more nuanced and historicized account of the relationship between economics and the humanities.