In its depictions of characters' processes of decision-making, Jane Austen's Emma incorporates a model of choice that later came to dominate neoclassical economics. This model is preferential choice, which asserts that individuals choose based on their subjective, idiosyncratic preferences rather than following socially sanctioned value systems. While Emma represents preferential choice and illustrates its connection to consumer capitalism, unlike neoclassical economists, the novel ultimately exhibits skepticism toward this modern model of decision-making. This skepticism is rooted in Emma's conservative economic and political vision. Its conservatism paradoxically gestures to a point that is important to some of today's progressive thought: that our valorization of preferential choice—of the idea that choices should be a matter of individual desire for one option among many—is not inevitable and comes with its own significant difficulties. This article shows that even as the novel distances itself from consumerism's mode of preferential choosing, Emma's representation of preferential choice acknowledges its aesthetic importance in the construction of interiorized characters and in open-ended narrative forms. Such an acknowledgment shows Austen's recognition that consumerist habits of mind are important to literary production, especially at a moment when novels vied for attention in a competitive literary marketplace. In such a marketplace, readers chose among many disparate titles; the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century literary field was, indeed, one of the first manifestations of modern consumerism wherein overflowing markets tried to convince shoppers to express their individuality through their preferences for some goods over others.

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One of the peculiar challengesfacing scholars who wish to write about Thackeray's fiction is locating a dominant critical account to argue against. TheMLA Bibliographycontains a great number of examples of scrupulously argued, compelling research into Thackeray's body of writing, but few if any of them have reached any kind of canonical status as the (or even one of the) interpretive accounts that define how critics understand his fiction. It can seem, for example, that Thackeray is either consciously or unconsciously evaded by many scholars seeking to develop overarching, defining accounts of the nineteenth-century novel. In two works that helped set the terms for decades of critical conversation about nineteenth-century literature –Desire and Domestic Fiction(1987) andThe Novel and the Police(1988) – Nancy Armstrong and D. A. Miller each give at most a passing mention to Thackeray (he shows up four times in Armstong's book; never in Miller's). In their equally influential bodies of criticism, Mary Poovey and Catherine Gallagher provide no sustained – or even fragmentary – treatment of Thackeray's work. Moving into the twenty-first century, one would look in vain for a chapter on Thackeray in Amanda Anderson'sThe Powers of Distance(2001), Sharon Marcus'sBetween Women, and Alex Woloch'sThe One vs the Many(2003) – books that have provided us with key terms, issues, and methods to do our work. (To readers of this journal, it might be not necessary to say the following: Thackeray's fiction includes many illustrations of the phenomena discussed by these works – cosmopolitanism, female-female friendship, and minor characters – so his absence cannot be explained solely on this basis.) And to move backwards from the 1980s, Steven Marcus, J. Hillis Miller, and Raymond Williams produced pioneering analyses of the links between history, ideology, and Victorian literature, but Thackeray's writing played almost no part in their elaboration of those links, with Hillis Miller focusing on Thackeray only in one short essay and one book chapter among his large body of scholarship and Williams omitting him altogether fromThe English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence(1970).

This article surveys recent scholarship about Victorian novels' place in the nineteenth-century publishing system. With particular attention to criticism concerning the work of William Makepeace Thackeray, it examines how this scholarship, which reflects a renewed, discipline-wide interest in book history and media studies, adopts some of poststructuralist theory's ideas; it goes on to show the ways this adoption helps differentiate this new work from a previous generation of scholarship on Victorian book history. It contextualizes this new concern with publication, authorial professionalization, and structures of cultural prestige and legitimation in the Victorian period within the pervasive discourse about academic jobs and professionalization during the 1990s, many of the key words and concepts of which are shared by book-history criticism. Finally, it suggests directions for future study opened up by this new criticism, arguing that this criticism might help analyze the aesthetic particularity of authors' works -a topic that has merited little attention, as the last several decades' theoretical trends have focused on abstract linguistic, ideological, and now, publishing systems. IThis article focuses on the recent -and to some extent, renewed -scholarly attention critics of the novel have been paying to the Victorian publishing system.'The publishing system' denominates the publishers, authors, editors, booksellers, and readers who produced and consumed the printed, tangible product (as opposed to only the text) of the Victorian novel. Since the interrelationships between these parties were structured by identifiable contracts and conventions, these relations make up a 'system' with particular processes and effects. A student of Victorian literature, performing even casual research on a particular work or author, will soon come across evidence of this system at work, in for instance, Elizabeth Gaskell's decision at the behest of her publisher to title her first novel Mary Barton and Charles Dickens's habitual attention to deadlines, printing schedules for his serials, and circulation numbers.The system's fairly regular structures and widespread effects also -and somewhat paradoxically -threaten to make it rather insignificant as an object

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