provides a transhistorical account of (economic man), demonstrating this figure’s significance to economic theory and the Anglo-American novel over a 250-year period. Beginning with Adam Smith’s seminal texts – and – and Henry Fielding’s , this book combines the methodologies of new historicism and new economic criticism to investigate the evolution of the model as it traverses through Ricardian economics and Jane Austen’s ; J. S. Mill and Charles Dickens’ engagement with mid-Victorian dualities; Keynesianism and ’s exploration of post-war consumer impulses; the a/moralistic discourses of Friedrich von Hayek, and Ayn Rand’s ; and finally the virtual crises of the twenty-first century financial market and DonDeLillo’s . Through its sustained comparative analysis of literary and economic discourses, this book transforms our understanding of the genre of the novel and offers critical new understandings of literary value, cultural capital and the moral foundations of political economy.