Money and the European metropolis : the novels of Sydney Owenson, Maria Edgeworth, Somerville and Ross, and Kate O'Brien

• Main Author: Reznicek, M. L.
• Published: Queen's University Belfast 2014
• Subjects: 823
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.680385

Focusing on Irish women's novels set in Paris, this thesis interrogates an underrepresented tradition that reveals complex and nuanced engagements with the development of selfhood and modern capitalism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The writings of Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan), Maria Edgeworth, Edith Somerville and Martin Ross (Violet Martin), and Kate O'Brien, spanning from the early-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century, . provide a broad scope to view the long waves of this tradition. While these texts are not reducible to mere treatises on modern economics, their focus on individuals and their development provides the foundation for a literary tradition I have described as the economic Bildungsroman, This tradition demonstrates the way capitalism functions as a socialising system, building upon the theories of Karl Marx, Georg Simmel, and Franco Moretti. Such a framework allows these writers to emphasise the human, and especially the gendered, experience of and response to modern capitalism capitalism. As similar claims have been made for leading European writers such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Honore de Balzac, and Emile Zola, this study firmly situates the economic tradition of Irish women's writing within a Continental framework, providing a fuller comparison with their European. counterparts than has hitherto been made.