In Uncanny Capitalism, I examine works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that incorporate literary elements typically associated with gothic fiction into their depictions of America's capitalist economy. In so doing, I trace a widespread tendency found throughout American literature to some of its earliest and most revealing manifestations, arguing that the gothic lent itself to such uses because eighteenth-century thinkers had long relied upon the fictional mode to represent the divergence between their own commercial societies and the feudal economies of the past. In the course of its development, capitalism occasionally displayed characteristics that linked it with the gothic practices it had supposedly left behind. When it did, my chosen writers used the gothic to represent the convergence between America's commercial economy and its putative other.Chapter one examines the dichotomy that J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur establishes between Europe and America in Letters from an American Farmer that is founded upon two opposing forms of power: an oppressive European one and another that is American and productive. This opposition collapses in the letter devoted to Charles Town where Europe's feudal institutions have made an uncanny reappearance on American soil. Chapter two reads the self-incriminating narrators of Edgar Allan Poe's tales of murder and confession as grotesque examples of the types of coercion upon which the nation's emerging market economy depended in the nineteenth-century. Chapter three examines Frederick Douglass' alternation between the formal techniques of the realist and gothic novels in his 1845 Narrative, and argues that Douglass uses the figure of the gothic monster to apprehend the way in which slavery violates the natural order by commodifying human beings and placing them on a par with the brute creation. I conclude the dissertation with an analysis of the uncanny episodes in The Blithedale Romance that Nathaniel Hawthorne uses to reveal the long reach of the commodity form and the futility of any efforts at escaping the deleterious effects of the market revolution via a Transcendentalist retreat into nature.

Horror films act as a barometer for society's tensions and anxieties, and the early years of the twenty-first century have seen a notable increase in such movies, the zombie narrative in particular. This "Zombie Renaissance" demonstrates increased dread concerning violent death--via terrorist attacks or contagious infection--and establishes the currency of a critical investigation into this oft-maligned subgenre. The zombie narrative has particular value to American cultural studies as the creature was born on the shores of the New World, rather than being co-opted from the Old, and it functions as a symbolic reminder of the atrocities of colonialism and slavery. Drawing on ethnographic studies of Haitian folklore, the voodoo-based zombie films of the 1930s and '40s do crucial cultural work in their own right, revealing deep-seated racist attitudes and imperialist paranoia, but the zombie invasion narrative established by George A. Romero has even greater singularity. Having no established literary analogue, Romero borrowed instead from voodoo mythology, vampire tales, and science fiction invasion narratives to develop a new tradition with Night of the Living Dead in 1968. His conception of a contagious, cannibalistic zombie horde uniquely manifests modern apprehensions about the horrors of Vietnam, the struggles of the Civil Rights Movement, and, in the more recent films, the problems of excessive consumerism and the anxieties of both the Cold War and the current War on Terror. Essentially, zombies work as powerful metaphors for modern-day society and the prevailing cultural unease surrounding violent death and the loss of autonomous subjectivity, and, as recent production proves, the subgenre will continue to serve the viewing public as it grows, mutates, and evolves.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of English, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1991. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 258-262). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2004. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 215-223).

Inaug.-diss.--Rostock. / "Works consulted": p. [5]-6.

Inaug.-diss.--Freiburg i. Breisgau. / Lebenslauf. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. "Literatur-Verzeichnix": p. 75.

Thesis--Bonn, 1931.

Thesis--Münster, 1975. / At head of title: Kunstgeschichte. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (Bd. 2, p. 502-508).

Zugl.: Salzburg, Universiẗat, Diss., 2005. / Hergestellt on demand.