![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I would argue that it is no accident of history or coincidence that these two cultural artefacts, whilst wildly separate in time and space, seem to share a commonality: according to Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s Monster Culture (Seven Theses) (1996), we can “understand cultures through the monsters they bear”, but why are the monsters so similar when the cultural, geographical and temporal locations are so different? I will demonstrate how analogous points in global economic patterns bear similar cultural production and thus can be better understood by my drawing parallels between them, here in a case study of the Gothic genre.Ĭomparative literary and cultural studies are in a state of crisis: ordering and classifying materials by period, language, region, and so on proves unsatisfying for theorists such as Franco Moretti.įranco Moretti calls the traditional practice of examining texts “close reading” (Conjectures on World Literature (2000) which, whilst still a reasonable enough method of managing literature, it “necessarily depends on an extremely small canon… you invest… in individual texts only if you think that very few of them really matter” (Conjectures 162). ![]()
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