The Feeling of Letting Die

Necroeconomics and Victorian Fiction

Jennifer MacLure

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780814258903
  9780814214855
• eBook ISBN:
  9780814283165
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Feeling of Letting Die, Jennifer MacLure explores how Victorian novels depict the feelings that both fuel and are produced by an economic system that lets some people die in service of the free market. MacLure argues that Victorian authors present capitalism's death function as a sticking point, a series of contradictions, and a problem to solve as characters grapple with systems that allow, demand, and cause the deaths of their less fortunate fellows.

Utilizing Achille Mbembe's theorization of necropolitics, MacLure uses the term "necroeconomics," positioning Victorian authors—even those who were deeply committed to liberal capitalism—as hyperaware of capitalism's death function. Examining both canonical and lesser-known works by Elizabeth Gaskell, Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, William Morris, and George Eliot, The Feeling of Letting Die shows capitalism as not straightforwardly imposed via economic policy but instead as a system functioning through the emotions and desires of the human beings who enact it. In doing so, MacLure reveals how emotion functions as both the legitimating epistemic mode of capitalism and its most salient threat.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction Death by Invisible Hand
• Chapter 1 How to Let Die: Malthusian Medicine in Martineau and Marcus
• Chapter 2 Making Ill: Pathoeconomics in Gaskell’s Industrial Novels
• Chapter 3 Letting Die Slowly: Necroeconomic Pleasure in Dickens’s Bleak House
• Chapter 4 Unfeeling Capitalism, Future and Past: Middlemarch, Felix Holt, and News from Nowhere
• Afterword Our Necroeconomic Present
• Works Cited
• Index