Charles Lewis – författare

This interdisciplinary study examines four major British and American novels in view of key concepts from the mainstream tradition of neoclassical economics. Studies of the novel widely address its connections to capitalism, yet literary critics and theorists rarely make reference to neoclassical perspectives, which have held a key position in the formal analysis of the marketplace for over a century.Lewis argues that this overlooked area of economic thought, with its emphasis on subjective value, individual agency, and utility maximization, points to a previously unrecognized and important coincidence of wants between economic and novelistic discourse. In each of the four readings, Lewis uses a single economic problem from neoclassical theory as a model for interpreting novelistic form and content as economic configurations. Topics include narrative deferral, detour, and return as a performance of capital formation and economic development in Daniel Defoe''s Robinson Crusoe; the emergence of the creative, risk-taking entrepreneur in Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein; the representation of money in the romantic realization of trade in Herman Melville''s Moby Dick; and a consumer utility theory of naturalist desire and indifference in Theodore Dreiser''s Sister Carrie.Underscoring how neoclassical theory variously elaborates on and departs from other economic approaches and periods, the author also addresses the limitations of, and the possibilities of profitable exchange with, other critical frameworks for understanding literal and symbolic economies in narrative fiction more broadly.

This interdisciplinary study examines four major British and American novels in view of key concepts from the mainstream tradition of neoclassical economics. Studies of the novel widely address its connections to capitalism, yet literary critics and theorists rarely make reference to neoclassical perspectives, which have held a key position in the formal analysis of the marketplace for over a century.Lewis argues that this overlooked area of economic thought, with its emphasis on subjective value, individual agency, and utility maximization, points to a previously unrecognized and important coincidence of wants between economic and novelistic discourse. In each of the four readings, Lewis uses a single economic problem from neoclassical theory as a model for interpreting novelistic form and content as economic configurations. Topics include narrative deferral, detour, and return as a performance of capital formation and economic development in Daniel Defoe''s Robinson Crusoe; the emergence of the creative, risk-taking entrepreneur in Mary Shelley''s Frankenstein; the representation of money in the romantic realization of trade in Herman Melville''s Moby Dick; and a consumer utility theory of naturalist desire and indifference in Theodore Dreiser''s Sister Carrie.Underscoring how neoclassical theory variously elaborates on and departs from other economic approaches and periods, the author also addresses the limitations of, and the possibilities of profitable exchange with, other critical frameworks for understanding literal and symbolic economies in narrative fiction more broadly.

The place of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) in European literature is assured, and his significance for the development of German philosophy widely acknowledged. Here the focus is more specifically upon his poetics: a body of reflections on the nature of poetry and the meaning of the poet’s vocation. These are found in poems and letters, in difficult (and often fragmentary) theoretical writings, and — in the case of the ’Pindar Fragments’ — texts in which the distinction between poetry and theoretical reflection seems to be overcome. Although Hölderlin’s poetics is considered from various points of view, the themes that emerge most frequently are Hölderlin’s notion of a ’poetic law’ or ’poetic logic’, and his conception of tragedy and of what might be called the ’anti-tragic’. Also included is a new translation of Hölderlin’s ’Notes’ on Sophocles, which are here provided with a commentary.

Charles Lewis received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Cambridge University. He has taught at Princeton University, and held an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at the Free University, Berlin.