Brontë Economy

A couple of new books with Brontë references:

The Literary Book of Economics
Including Readings from Literature and Drama on Economic Concepts, Issues, and Themes
Edited, with commentary, by Michael Watts
Publisher: ISI Books
Cloth • Pages: 373
ISBN10/13: 1932236023 / 9781932236026

In The Literary Book of Economics, economist Michael Watts presents a fresh approach to economic education and literacy. Professor Watts uses seventy-eight selections from classic and contemporary fiction, drama, poetry, and prose to give flesh to more than twenty major economic concepts, issues, and themes.
In Watts's hands, selections from Robert Frost, Sebastian Junger, and John Steinbeck illuminate the nature of property rights; Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson speak to specialization and the division of labor; John Dos Passos and Joseph Heller provide commentary on entrepreneurship; Charles Dickens and Arundhati Roy illustrate the concepts of public goods and externalities; Benjamin Franklin, George Orwell, and F. Scott Fitzgerald give readers a better sense of how labor markets and unions work; and Shakespeare and Kurt Vonnegut discuss economic inequality. And there is much more, including passages from John Milton, Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Arthur Miller, Amy Tan, Ivan Doig, and many others.
The Literary Book of Economics is one of the most innovative approaches to economic education and literacy ever published. As empirical research has demonstrated, economics is taught more effectively when integrated into other fields, and is perhaps particularly effective when coupled with the classic literary works of Western culture, which allows great authors to use their erudition to convey economic concepts and topics too often treated only theoretically. Teachers and students of literature and economics have much to gain by studying economic topics and concepts in this way. With each section—and each individual selection—preceded by Watts's insightful analysis, and the inclusion of a helpful introduction and appendices that further explain the relationship between economics and literature, The Literary Book of Economics makes study of the "dismal science" an enlightening and invigorating enterprise.

The book contains a section devoted to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights in the chapter Self-Interest and Economic Systems.

We also report the appearance of the paperback edition of The Literary Tourist published last year in hardback:

The Literary Tourist
Readers and Places in Romantic and Victorian Britain
Nicola J. Watson
ISBN: 1403999929

Now available in paperback, this is the first full-length study of the phenomenon of literary tourism as it emerges in nineteenth-century Britain - seems to be subject of increasing interest in academic circles. It deals with tourism associated with a number of major authors, including Shakespeare, the Brontes, Phillip Pullman and Hardy. It is written in a lively, accessible and witty style. It draws upon a wide and eclectic range of materials - tourist handbooks, travel literature, personal diaries, letters, museum displays, novels, film, poems and paintings. It features a series of illustrations never before reproduced. It is now available in long-awaited paperback edition - hardback has sold well, with lots of review coverage.This original, witty, illustrated study, now available for the first time in paperback, offers the first analytical history of the rise and development of literary tourism in nineteenth-century Britain, associated with authors from Shakespeare, Gray, Keats, Burns and Scott, the Bronte sisters, and Thomas Hardy.

Categories: Books, Scholar