Capitalism

doi:10.1017/9781009071550.004

2 - Capitalism

from Part I - Histories

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 July 2022

Mark Steven

Edited by

Stephen Shapiro and

Mark Storey

Show author details

Stephen Shapiro: Affiliation:
University of Warwick
Mark Storey: Affiliation:
University of Warwick

Book contents

Get access

Summary

This chapter demonstrates the critical synonymy of horror and capitalism in American literary narrative. Beginning with colonization before accelerating into the period of exponential growth from around the Civil War through the Great Depression, the chapter looks to scenes of indigenous dispossession, resource extraction, urban industrialization, unemployed immiseration, and finally to the reactionary suppression with which capital protects its interests. The guiding hypothesis is that horror obtains into all of these crucial areas of the economy because capitalist accumulation is, in all of its forms, a catastrophically exploitative relationship between humans that depends on sensuous creation and so requires the productive grist of blood, brains, and bodies.

Keywords

capitalism colonialism exploitation horror Marx Cooper Melville, Sinclair London Dos Passos

Type: Chapter
Information: The Cambridge Companion to American Horror , pp. 29 - 44

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009071550.004 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. 1826. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.Google Scholar

Davis, Rebecca Harding. Life in the Iron Mills. New York: Bedford, 1861.Google Scholar

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.Google Scholar

Dos Passos, John. “Sacco and Vanzetti.” The New Masses, November 25, 1927.Google Scholar

Dos Passos, John. U. S. A. New York: Modern Library, 1930.Google Scholar

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1935.Google Scholar

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. “Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography.” The Professional Geographer 54, no. 1 (2002): 15–24.CrossRef Google Scholar

James, C. L. R. Mariners, Renegades, and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1953.Google Scholar

Kelly, P. William. Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and The Leatherstocking Tales. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.Google Scholar

Lenin, Vladimir. Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967.Google Scholar

London, Jack. The Iron Heel. London: Penguin, 2006.Google Scholar

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin, 1990.Google Scholar

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. London: Picador, 2006.Google Scholar

Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851. New York: Norton, 1967.Google Scholar

Mirowski, Philip. Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown. London: Verso, 2013.Google Scholar

Phippen, J. Weston. “‘Kill Every Buffalo You Can! Every Buffalo Dead Is an Indian Gone.’” The Atlantic, May 13, 2016. www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2016/05/the-buffalo-killers/482349/.Google Scholar

Poe, Edgar Allan. Poetry and Tales. New York: Library of America, 1994.Google Scholar

Scott, Heidi. “Whale Oil Culture, Consumerism, and Modern Conservation.” In Oil Culture, ed. Barrett, Ross and Worden, Daniel. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2004. 3–18.Google Scholar

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.Google Scholar

Sullivan, Mark. Our Times: America at the Birth of the Twentieth Century. New York: Scribner, 1996.Google Scholar