Henry Jamess Sublime Economy

Over the last two centuries, artists, critics, philosophers and theorists have contributed significantly to such representations of "the economy" as sublime. It might even be said that much of the emergence of a distinctly "modern" art in the West is inextricably linked to the perception of art’s own autonomy and, therefore, its privileged, mostly critical, gaze at the terrible mixture of wonder and horror of capitalist economic practices and institutions. The premise of this collection is that despite this perceptual sharing, "sublime economy" has yet to be investigated in a purely cross-disciplinary way. Sublime Economy seeks to map this critical territory by exploring the ways diverse concepts of economy and economic value have been culturally constituted and disseminated through modern art and cultural practice. Comprising of 14 individual essays along with an editors’ introduction, Sublime Economy draws together work from some of the leading scholars in the several fields currently exploring the intersection of economic and aesthetic practices and discourses. A pressing issue of this cross-disciplinary conversation is to discern how artists’, writers’, and cultural scholars’ constructions of distinct conceptions of economic value, as pertains to aesthetic objects as well as to more "everyday" objects and relations of mass consumption, have contributed to the ways "value" functions in and across disparate discourses. Thus this book looks at how cultural critics and theorists have put forward working notions of economic value that have regularities and effects similar to those of the "expert" conceptions and discourses about value that have been the preserve of professional economists.

First Published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The success of a work of art, to my mind, may be measured by the degree to which it produces a certain illusion; that makes it appear to us that we have lived another life, that we have had a miraculous enlargement of experience. Henry James A concept of 'illusion' was fundamental to the theory and practice of literary representation in Henry James. This book offers readings of James' fictional and critical texts that are informed by the certainty of illusion, and links James' mode of illusion with a number of concerns that have marked novel criticism in both the recent and not-so-recent past: gender, publicity, realism, aesthetics and passion, cults of authorial personality, the narrative construction of the future, and absorption. Flannery addresses each of these concerns through close engagement with particular texts: The Portrait of a Lady, The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, and some other less familiar texts. Although cognizant of debates that have raged around James as he is read both by 'radical' and 'traditional' critics, this book's primary focus is on the specific nuances of James’ texts and the interpretive challenges and pleasures they offer.

This is a pathbreaking work which develops a new form of economic analysis. This collection brings together 27 essays by influential literary and cultural historians as well as representatives of the vanguard of postmodernist economics.