Walter Barta

Diminishing Marginal Utility is widely accepted as a law of human action, and therefor has become one of the primary premises of ethics, economics, and politics. In popular parlance, “diminishing returns” has entered into the cliches of common sense; in philosophical argument, it has achieved the status of an axiomatic assumption; and indeed, in terms of personal experience or folk psychology, it seems to largely hold true for goods in general over a range of consumption. However, a theory of diminishing marginal utility rests on some assumptions that we ignore at our peril. The a priori and a posteriori proofs of diminishing marginal utility, as developed by the Austrian economists like Ludwig von Mises and Hermann Heinrich Gossen, should be reassessed and critiqued from their fundamental principles to illuminate the theory’s pitfalls. Once these premises and their conclusions are not taken for granted, a more comprehensive and conscientious theory of value can be proposed: Complex or Inflecting Marginal Utility.

This essay argues that literary histories organized around a single genre, narratives of national formation, or canonical male authors cannot do justice to the complexities of womens participation in eighteenth-century British genres. Instead, this essay offers an alternative approach based on the reduction of the geotemporal scope to the literary productions of a single year in three cities. Working with the ESTC records for the 2000+ items produced in these cities helped produce a dataset that allowed us to recreate each city's literary and non-literary genre system, print environment, and "historical present" for the target year. This inventory became the basis for a microhistory of women's literary and nonliterary textual production for this year, organized by city, category, and genre. From this project we learned of London's overwhelming commercial dominance for genres both literary (sentimental fiction, semifictional memoirs, religious elegy) and non-literary and "improving" (both Montagus, Macaulay, Talbot). Women in the other two cities contributed largely through salon and coterie activities or didactic/devotional writings. Finally, the temporalized notion of perplexity identifies a characteristic pause in action when female characters are forced to place their trust in men of unknown character: this is a scenario that plays out through a variety of genres during this year, from sentimental fiction to pro- and anti-war polemics. Our microhistorical, scaled-down approach to feminist literary history offers a version of "recovery and counter-representation" that can accommodate multiple recovery projects, fresh perspectives, and deeper inquiries into once-neglected or newly available sources.