Abject Capitalism as the Sight of Dead Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Novels

By extending Imogen Tyler’s and Jack Halberstam’s theories of the abject, the image of the dead body in nineteenth-century literature reveals the structural inequalities that shape the nineteenth-century economy through biopolitical processes, as well as demonstrating the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel, as a literary form, attempts to obscure or contain the everyday crisis of poverty. In the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Charles Dickens, the presence of the dead body decisively disrupts the socio-economic narrative of normality and containment, resulting in a crisis of representation for the Gothic economy.