SPECTRAL IMAGERY IN THE ANTEBELLUM MIND

Author (s) : B.Balasubashini, T.Ranjulapushpa,D.Martin Luthar

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Abstract :
Apparitional Economies is concerned in both a historical assessment of economic conditions through the antebellum era and an investigation of how spectral depictions convey the effects of such situations on local publics and individual people. From this vantage point, the research shows how deeply the literature of the time period is entwined with the economic: in the limits of seemingly unstoppable progress, in the standards of value that order the worth of commodities, and in the people who can trade for them.  I contend that the specter's realm functions as a force of representation, an occult setting where the shadowy forces of antebellum social and economic transformation are made manifest. The classic works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman, as well as more recent works by Robert Montgomery Bird, Theophilus Fisk, Fitz James O'Brien, and Edward Williams Clay, all contain references to this ethereal area.  In terms of methodology, Apparitional Economies moves chronologically through historical occurrences and textual representation (starting with the specters that emerge with the Panic of 1837) and interpretively across readings of a literary specter (as a space of lack and potential, as exchange, as transformation, and as the presence of absence). The literary specter serves as a potent illustration of antebellum social and financial uncertainty since it is a failed body and so a defective incarnation of economic existence.

Keywords : Antebellum, Shadowy, Mainfest, Interpretively.

Conference Date : 17/09/2021

Pages : 150

Paper ID : IESMDT148