Gothic economies: Global capitalism and the boundaries of identity

<p>Since Dickens and Mary Shelley, the Gothic has provided a rubric for literary conceptualizations of modernity. Dickens' depictions of industrial London characterize it as a labyrinth of temptations and horrors, haunted by monstrosity and by personal and social demons; the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is the disfigured byproduct of science and technology. Bram Stoker's Dracula, perhaps the most effective &quot;global&quot; narrative to come out of the British fin de siecle, grafted elements of a pre-Enlightenment atavism onto the turn-of-the-century liberal metropolis. In our own era, the literature of the postmodern technopolis---the fiction of William Gibson, for example---has continued to borrow Gothic motifs and devices.</p><p>This dissertation is a study of literary representations of technology, capitalism and the modern metropolis---representations based in the anxieties and desires that accompany middle-class self-fashioning. The Gothic, in its original guise, depicts the corruption and ruination of the estate, often by economic and cultural forces emanating from the city and associated with capitalism and modernity; thus, to invoke the Gothic is also to reference middle class guilt and doubts about legitimacy. At the same time, Gothic allusions allow the middle class to retell its foundational myth of a struggle for liberation from feudal constraints.</p><p>Much 19th and 20th literature, both popular and highbrow, entertains an ambiguous and complicated relationship to the city---the site of economic, political and cultural forces which are both liberating and traumatizing. Though capitalism and technology drove its ascendancy, the middle class has traditionally seen the city as a place both of opportunity and danger, of allure and revulsion or horror---a set of mixed emotions which tends to suggest an insecure, unstable or divided subjectivity. This complicated relationship to the city provided much of the impetus for the quest to build a &quot;bourgeois utopia&quot;---a refuge located at the fringe of the city in which the equilibrium of a romanticized pre-urban order is recovered. But because the contradictions within middle class identity can never be fully resolved, the &quot;utopia&quot; always harbors the potential to become a haunted grove, visited by that which has been repressed or abjected in the process of creating modernity.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Year

2002

Author dc:creator

• Herschbach, Robert Adrian

Contributors dc:contributor

• James Krasner

• Literature
• English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholars.unh.edu/dissertation/118

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholars.unh.edu:dissertation-1117