《伦敦商人》与十八世纪英国经济思想转型焦虑

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基金项目:国家社科基金重大招标项目“英国文学经济思想史”(编号:22&ZD289)。

作者简介:陶久胜,男,士,教授,国家社科基金重大项目首席专家,研究方向为英国文艺复兴文学、文学跨学科研究。殷博,男,研究生。

Title: The London Merchant and the Anxieties Surrounding the Transformation of EighteenthCenturyBritish Economic Thought

Abstract: As a pivotal economic institution of mercantilist ideology within domestic trade, the guild apprenticeship system long played an active role in economic regulation and social governance yet faced systematic and comprehensive challenges from free trade advocates during the eighteenth century, leading to its rapid disintegration. In the play The London Merchant, George Lillo constructs a dramatic confrontation between a guild master representing mercantilist principles and practitioners of desire-driven economic practices embodying free trade ideologies. This antagonism mirrors the broader British societal debate between two competing economic philosophies regarding commercial afirs. Through a gendered narrative framework applied to economic thought, the play reveals the dynamic shifts within early British mainstream economic theory and practice. While portraying idealized mercantilist figures, the drama simultaneously expresses sympathy and recognition toward free economic agents, resulting in thematic ambiguity. This duality not only conveys nostalgia for the traditional mercantilist economic order and anxieties about social disorder following the collapse of apprenticeship systems,but also anticipates the potential triumph of emerging classical economic free-market ideologies. Such narrative tensions reflect the profound societal anxieties in eighteenth-century Britain regarding the transformation of economic paradigms

Key words: George Lillo; The London Merchant; the guild apprenticeship system; mercantilism; free market thought

Authors: Tao Jiusheng is professor at The Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ningbo University (Ningbo 315211, China). His main research areas are British literature of the Renaissance period and interdisciplinary studies of literature. E-mail: taojiush @ 163.com. Yin Bo is postgraduate student at The Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ningbo University.

面对妓女米尔伍德(Millwood)的诱惑,学徒巴恩维尔(Barnwell)陷人困境。(剩余26770字)

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