Governing Consumption

Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the "Origins" of Eighteenth-Century English Novels

James Cruise

1999
246 pages
$42.50
ISBN 0-8387-5428-7
LC 98-23974
Bucknell Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture

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 demands-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 then Sterne, failed in his attempt to erect character as a moral buffer against the suspense of a commercially driven world. Instead, they engaged, as Cruise demonstrates, in a process of historical revision that divided the past from the present through an erosion of teleologies and other forms of structured history.

Governing Consumption thus makes a telling and original contribution to the growing body of recent criticism on the form, discourse, and culture of the eighteenth-century English novel.

About the author:

James Cruise received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests and publications have focused on the relationship between the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English economy and the literature of the period, especially the novel. He is on the faculty at Northwestern State University of Louisiana.