Protagonists of Production in Preindustrial European Literature (1700-1800)

What form did the portrayal of business owners, entrepreneurs, peasants, craftspeople and similar ‘protagonists of production’ take before it became the subject of negative assessments in the epoch of industrialization? Focusing on the European Enlightenment movement with a special emphasis on Spain, this volume sheds light on how both male and female figures working in production are represented by novels, plays, economic tracts and in the press. Literary scholars, historians, and economists analyse how those portrayals are related to the history of economic thought, 18th-century economic discourse, and enlightened Political Economy. With an epilogue by Deirdre McCloskey.

Beatrice Schuchardt is a scholar of Spanish and French Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Dresden, Germany. Her areas of interests include the anthropologization of enlightened economic theory in Spanish 18th century theatre, Latin American media icons, Postcolonial Theory, trauma and dictatorship in Latin American detective novels, and performance subjects in the genre of Spanish, Latin American and French epistomail. Christian von Tschilschke holds the chair of Romance Literary Studies (Spanish) at the University of Münster, Germany. His research interests include the relationship between literature and media (film/television), theory and practices of intermediality, documentarism and docufiction, French, Spanish and Latin-American cinema, Spanish literature and culture of the 18th century, French and Spanish contemporary literature as well as the Spanish discourse about Africa.