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Since the Victorian period, the domestic sphere of the private home has been regarded by many as antithetical to a public world of finance, politics, and progress. However, an analysis of the etymological origin of the word ‘economy’ leads us to the Greek term oikonomia, denoting the family or household management, implying that the two are more closely intertwined than we may tend to think. In this course, we will read literary texts from the Victorian period to the present and analyse how fiction reflects on the relationship between the home and the economy. We will specifically consider the context of changing conceptions of labour and gender, as well as shifts in economic and political structures in Britain. By interspersing our literary readings with theoretical texts on economics, labour, and the home, we will investigate what fiction can tell us about the changing relationship between economics and the domestic from the 19th century until today. |
