The Economy Of Character

At the start of the 18th century, literary "characters" referred as much to letters and typefaces as it did to persons in books. However, this text shows how, by the 19th century, readers used transactions with characters to accommodate themselves to newly-commercialized social relations.

The establishment of citizenship education as a compulsory subject has recently been accompanied by the government's policy of 'promoting education with character.' Schools are identified as having a crucial role to play in helping to shape and reinforce basic character traits that will ultimately lead to a better society. This radical new policy is explicitly linked to raising academic standards and to the needs of the emerging new economy. This book provides an introduction to character education within the British context by exploring its meanings, understandings, and rationale, through the perspective of a number of academic disciplines. The author examines character education from a philosophical, religious, psychological, political, social and economic perspective to offer a more detailed understanding of character education and what it can offer. He also considers how British schools can implement character education successfully and what lessons we can draw from the American experience. This book will be of interest to academics, researchers, policy makers and teachers with responsibility for citizenship education in their schools.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1875.

This 1857 discussion of economics is, at its heart, both a scientific and a philosophical inquiry. Modern readers may find it striking that unlike current textbooks on the subject, The Character and Logical Method of Political Economy does not deal heavily with mathematical models and formulas. It does not, in fact, deal with them at all. Cairnes believed that while mathematics could have a place in demonstrating economic truths, it could not discover those truths on its own. Economics is founded upon people, their feelings, and their actions. And that, he believed, could not be further explored by math than it was already being explored by philosophy. The lectures here introduce fundamental principles of economics. At the time of its writing, these principles were still hotly debated, so Cairnes both explains and offers a defense for his particular views on how markets work, what drives production, and what drives individuals to make the decisions that affect wealth. Students of economics and anyone with an interest in the subject will find this a greatly informative read. Irish economist JOHN ELLIOT CAIRNES (1823-1875) is the author of numerous books, including Slave Power (1862) and An Examination into the Principles of Currency (1854).

Why did coinage, tyranny, and philosophy develop in the same time and place? Marc Shell explores how both money and language give "worth" by providing a medium of exchange, how the development of money led to a revolution in philosophical thought and language, and how words transform mere commodities into symbols at once aesthetic and practical. Offering carefully documented interpretations of texts from Heraclitus, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Ruskin, Shell demonstrates the kinship between literary and economic theory and production, introduces new methods of analyzing texts, and shows how literary and philosophical fictions can help us understand the world in which we live.

A Business Week Best Book of the Year.... "A devastating and wholly necessary book."—Studs Terkel, author of Working In The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett, "among the country's most distinguished thinkers . . . has concentrated into 176 pages a profoundly affecting argument" (Business Week) that draws on interviews with dismissed IBM executives, bakers, a bartender turned advertising executive, and many others to call into question the terms of our new economy. In his 1972 classic, The Hidden Injuries of Class (written with Jonathan Cobb), Sennett interviewed a man he called Enrico, a hardworking janitor whose life was structured by a union pay schedule and given meaning by his sacrifices for the future. In this new book-a #1 bestseller in Germany-Sennett explores the contemporary scene characterized by Enrico's son, Rico, whose life is more materially successful, yet whose work lacks long-term commitments or loyalties. Distinguished by Sennett's "combination of broad historical and literary learning and a reporter's willingness to walk into a store or factory [and] strike up a conversation" (New York Times Book Review), this book "challenges the reader to decide whether the flexibility of modern capitalism . . . is merely a fresh form of oppression" (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Praise for The Corrosion of Character: "A benchmark for our time."—Daniel Bell "[A]n incredibly insightful book."—William Julius Wilson "[A] remarkable synthesis of acute empirical observation and serious moral reflection."—Richard Rorty "[Sennett] offers abundant fresh insights . . . illuminated by his concern with people's struggle to give meaning to their lives."—[Memphis] Commercial Appeal

How do genres develop? In what ways do they reflect changing political and cultural trends? What do they tell us about the motivations of publishers and readers? Combining close readings and formal analysis with a sociology of literary institutions and markets, Minor Characters Have Their Day offers a compelling new approach to genre study and contemporary fiction. Focusing on the booming genre of books that transform minor characters from canonical literary texts into the protagonists of new works, Jeremy Rosen makes broader claims about the state of contemporary fiction, the strategies of the publishing industry over recent decades, and the function of literary characters. Rosen traces the recent surge in "minor-character elaboration" to the late 1960s and works such as Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. These early examples often recover the voices of marginalized individuals and groups. As the genre has exploded between the 1980s and the present, with novels about Ahab's wife, Huck Finn's father, and Mr. Dalloway, it has begun to embody the neoliberal commitments of subjective experience, individual expression, and agency. Eventually, large-scale publishers capitalized on the genre as a way to appeal to educated audiences aware of the prestige of the classics and to draw in identity-based niche markets. Rosen's conclusion ties the understudied evolution of minor-character elaboration to the theory of literary character.