The Problem Of Profit Finance And Feeling In Eighteenthcentury British Literature Michael Genovese by Michael Genovese 9780813942902, 081394290X instant download after payment.

"This idea that man lives by trading and trades to make money celebrated the commercial individual, and if he or she turned mercenary, it was taken as the inevitable result of profit seeking. "

"Throughout the following chapters, I argue that eighteenth-century literature purposefully constructed a communitarian version of profit, one that countered the axiom that a tradesperson’s motivation should be self-enrichment. To this end, periodical essays, poems, and novels combined the value of monetary accumulation with that of sympathetic association to divorce financial gain from the individual as self-owner unburdened by social obligation. Holding together the seemingly contradictory ways in which people affectively and financially interacted, this literature treated the autonomous self not as the starting point for the pursuit of profit but as an obstruction to it. "