The Vexed Story of Economic Criticism

Hewitt, Elizabeth

doi:10.1093/alh/ajp027

Cited by 7 publications

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“…In fact, it is precisely because literary critics are so informed about the market, and particularly the various markets in cultural products, that they have questioned traditional notions of artistic value. That was one of the points Elizabeth Hewitt (2009) made in her review essay "The Vexed Story of Economic Criticism": it has seemed to many writers who have thought about the problem that taking markets seriously means generally disregarding the aesthetic, since regarding the literary text as a commodity was at odds with the view that it was an instance of the autonomous aesthetic realm. So, far from comparing their own attempt to integrate the two ways of viewing the world to other work in this field, Morson and Schapiro fail even to recognize that it's a problem.…”

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confidence: 99%

Literature, Economics, and a Turn to Content

Fessenbecker¹,

Yazell²

2021

The Minnesota Review

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In much of the recent scholarship on economics and literature, the depth of insight is inversely proportional to the status claimed for literature as such. For example, Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro’s Cents and Sensibility argues that economists need to read literary works for their great moral wisdom, and they fault literary scholars for ignoring this appeal and for failing to understand basic economics. But as this survey of recent publications demonstrates, the conjunction of these critiques is odd: literary critics have been skeptical of claims about genuine value precisely because they have attended so closely to the markets structuring cultural production. What ultimately stands out in recent scholarship on economics and literature is its turn away from complex accounts of the nature of literary form and its turn toward considerations of the representation of economic life.

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confidence: 99%