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Gothic ecologies : world-literature and commodity frontiers from the plantation to the present
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Hugo, Esthie Esmaré (2022) Gothic ecologies : world-literature and commodity frontiers from the plantation to the present. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3983426
Abstract
The commodity frontier has become increasingly central to understandings of what Jason W. Moore describes as the capitalist world-ecology (2015). Taking their cue from Moore, several materialist literary scholars (Deckard 2017; Oloff 2018, Campbell 2020; Niblett 2020; Vandertop 2020) have looked to the commodity frontier to map how its socioecological operations are registered in ‘world-literature,’ so named to illustrate how literary forms encode the social logic of world capitalism (WReC, 2015). This project aims to contribute to the fields of commodity frontier studies and world-literature by offering the frontier as the material basis from which gothic forms of narrativisation emerge. To do so, I bring together Moore’s world-ecological perspective with Michael Niblett’s notion of the commodity frontier as a narrative category (2020) and argue that the gothic might prove a particularly fitting mode through which to express the racialised and gendered oppressions and ecological devaluations engendered by the capitalist world-system. My specific interest is in comparing fiction and poetry from the ‘long’ twentieth century to the present in terms of the socioecological transformations through which the sugar, silver, gold, and oil frontiers have developed. I focus on the gothic aesthetics of a range of literary works from three ‘(semi)peripheral’ sites from across the world-system: the Caribbean, Latin America, and West Africa. My analysis of these regions is divided into three chapters, each of which examines the socioecological particularities of the commodity frontier as these are mediated in the gothic vocabularies of (semi)peripheral world-literature from the specific locations of Barbados, Jamaica, Guyana, Mexico, Martinique, and Nigeria. By focusing on the fictions of Eric Walrond, Marlon James, Pauline Melville, Silvia Moreno-Ģarcia, Aimé Césaire, and Ben Okri, I make the claim that the gothic mode contains within it a crucial means of concretising the historical and material realities of the frontier zone and its attendant enviro-social life-worlds. I offer this project as a feminist eco-materialist investigation into the myriad ways in which the conditions of the sugar, silver, gold, and oil frontiers contour world-literary formation, leading to the eruption of gothic modalities that provide the generative comparative grounds from which to better comprehend the life- and environment-making dynamics of the commodity frontier from the plantation through to the present.
Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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Subjects: | P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0441 Literary History |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Commercial products in literature, Ecology in literature, Literature -- History and criticism, Gothic literature -- History and criticism, Capitalism | ||||
Official Date: | November 2022 | ||||
Dates: |
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Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
Theses Department: | Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies | ||||
Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Niblett, Michael | ||||
Format of File: | |||||
Extent: | iii, 251 pages | ||||
Language: | eng |
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