Skip to main content
College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

The 'Invisible Hand' and British Fiction, 1818-1860: Adam Smith, Political Economy, and the Genre of Realism

Invisible Hand
Palgrave MacMillan
January 2011

The 'invisible hand', Adam Smith's metaphor for the morality of capitalism, is explored in this text as being far more subtle and intricate than is usually understood, with many British realist fiction writers (Austen, Dickens, Gaskell, Eliot) having absorbed his model of ironic causality in complex societies and turned it to their own purposes.

 

College of Liberal Arts & Sciences Unit for Criticism & Interpretive Theory

100 English Building

608 South Wright Street

Urbana, Illinois 61801

Email: Unit-for-Criticism@illinois.edu

Login