<em>Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy</em>, by Deanna K. Kreisel<br/><em>Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century</em>, by Ayşe Çelikkol

Reviewed by: Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy by Deanna K. Kreisel, and: Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century by Ayşe Çelikkol Tamara S. Wagner (bio) Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy, by Deanna K. Kreisel; pp. xi + 309. Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2012, $65.00. Romances of Free Trade: British Literature, Laissez-Faire, and the Global Nineteenth Century, by Ayşe Çelikkol; pp. x + 189. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011, £52.00, $80.00. The discussion of what financial discourses do in and to nineteenth-century narratives has been a popular subject in Victorian studies for a while now. The focus, however, is undergoing a significant change. “New Economic Criticism,” formulated in a 1999 collection of the same title and edited by Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, has paved the way for a growing “body of literary and cultural criticism founded upon economic paradigms, models and tropes” (3). Financial discourses have been discussed in tandem with literary works that reflect or critically engage with them; narratives have been read through the lens of economic paradigms; and the way changes in financial systems and shifting attitudes to them shaped traditional genres and created new ones has come under new scrutiny, showing how close reading of popular fiction helps us to unpack the complexities of Victorian economic discourses and their relationship to literature. When Jonathan Rose wrote a review essay on no fewer than five books, published between 2000 and 2002, that were tackling Victorian ideas of finance, pointedly entitled “Was Capitalism Good for Victorian Literature?”, he pinpointed a growing problem with this form of criticism: that, despite the fact that “every important Victorian author deeply distrusted speculative capitalism,” a focus on how changing economic theories forged fiction might well make us wonder whether capitalism was good for literature (Victorian Studies 46.3 [2004], 491). Marxist criticism seems to become superseded by a form of “capitalist criticism” (Rose 489). Ten years after Rose’s 2004 assessment of the situation, this vexing issue seems more pressing than ever. Without doubt, it is exciting to see that current studies’ main interest has shifted (back?) to literary texts, that close reading is now affirmed as an essential methodological tool, supported or paralleled, to a larger or lesser extent, by elements of New [End Page 359] Historicism. However, the formal developments that capitalism or reactions to it could cause should not obscure critiques of capitalism—and not simply because most of the Victorian authors or readers would have been deeply shocked to see that financial speculation, for example, during their time could ever be construed as anything except a particularly evil side of modernity. Nearly a decade after Rose’s important assessment, this danger might still be there, but recent studies of Victorian economic discourse that highlight its significance for narrative have found unique ways of striking a balance. Deanna K. Kreisel’s Economic Woman: Demand, Gender, and Narrative Closure in Eliot and Hardy and Ayşe Çelikkol’s Romances of Free Trade engage with the narrative potential of nineteenth-century economic theories and practices in importantly different ways. The aim of Kreisel’s book is to trace the narratological effects of the Victorians’ anxieties about both the possibility of sudden economic collapse and the stagnation of economic demand. Clearly, the fear so pointedly expressed in Rose’s article is quickly alleged here: Kreisel shows the ways in which most of the “plots” by which political economy was being structured in both economic writing and in fiction “tended toward the apocalyptic” (11). But Kreisel also stresses that anxieties about the economy were complex, twofold in that they did not only involve fears of inflation, speculation manias, and fraudulent investment schemes, but also “an anxiety over failures of demand”: the fear that “capitalism must, by its very nature, self-destruct or reach a stagnant end” (13). Kreisel explores the ways in which classical economists themselves negotiated this fear, as well as those arguing against them. Kreisel identifies a set of key metaphors common to nineteenth-century economics: surplus, excess, and circulation. In...

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