Gail Turley Houston - From Dickens to Dracula, Gothic, Economics, and Victorian Fiction (2005).pdf - All History - roban15

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FROM DICKENS TO DRACULA

Ranging from the panoramic novels of Dickens to the horror of

Dracula, Gail Turley Houston examines the ways in which the

language and imagery of economics, commerce, and particularly of

banking are transformed in Victorian Gothic fiction, and traces

literary and uncanny elements in economic writings of the period.

Houston shows how banking crises were often linked with ghosts or

inexplicable non-human forces and financial panic was figured

through Gothic or supernatural means. In Little Dorrit and Villette

characters are literally haunted by money, while the unnameable

intimations of Dracula and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are represented

alongside realist economic concerns. Houston pays particular atten-

tion to the term ‘‘panic’’ as it moved between its double uses as a

banking term and a defining emotion in sensational and Gothic

fiction. This stimulating interdisciplinary book reveals that the

worlds of Victorian economics and Gothic fiction, seemingly sepa-

rate, actually complemented and enriched each other.

GAIL TURLEY HOUSTON is Associate Professor of English at the

University of New Mexico.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN NINETEENTH - CENTURY LITERATURE

AND CULTURE

General Editor

Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge

Editorial Board

Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, London

Kate Flint, Rutgers University

Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley

D. A. Miller, Columbia University

J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine

Daniel Pick, Queen Mary University of London

Mary Poovey, New York University

Sally Shuttleworth, University of Sheffield

Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for inter-

disciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and critics

have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and the

visual arts, social organization, economic life, technical innovations, scientific

thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theoretical

challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of previous

scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates. Whereas

the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the metaphor

of culture as ‘‘background,’’ feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses have

employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circulation.

Such developments have reanimated the field.

This series aims to accommodate and promote the most interesting work being

undertaken on the frontiers of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies:

work which intersects fruitfully with other fields of study such as history, or

literary theory, or the history of science. Comparative as well as interdisciplinary

approaches are welcomed.

A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.

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