Metaphors of Economic Exploitation in Literature, 1885-1914: Vampiric Enterprise

This volume is concerned with a complex network of predatory economic metaphors which emerged, at the fin de siècle, in response to rapidly changing economic, social and political conditions. These are metaphors which dramatised the conflictual and exploitative basis of relations between nations, institutions, sexes and people in what was widely experienced as an belligerent economy. The book argues that this phenomenon emerges not simply out of individuals’ enraged sense of the injustices of an expanding capitalist world system but moreover is a product of the proliferation of related radical countercultures and the critical discourses that grew out of them. Through a careful reading of literature published across a variety of genres, this volume suggests we can discover how the writers of this time absorbed, evolved and sometimes disputed a language of opposition to the dominant economic order which is loaded with gothic images of monstrosity and appetitive appropriation.