"Governing Consumption challenges anew the underlying assumptions made by Ian Watt and other, recent influential scholars about the origins of the eighteenth-century English novel. By examining archival materials, and developing a broad historical and critical discussion, James Cruise places the fiction of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Sterne within the framework of consumer capitalism, the existing market for narrative fiction, and a developing culture of needs and wants.

He thereby argues that commercialization and the dynamic of its demand-based economy helped to shape the cultural processes by which the novel became a discursively rich, character-centered genre. Paradoxically, however, each of these "realistic" novelists, other than Sterne, failed in his attempt to erect character as a moral buffer against the suspense of a commerically driven world."--BOOK JACKET.