THE WANDERER: | ScienceGate

This essay explores a particular moment in the history of commodity fetishism by means of an examination of Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814). The novel, which is explicitly concerned with the social changes facing early-nineteenth-century England, reveals that at this historical moment the commodity inspired emotions of a particular kind: it was idealized and perceived as attractively individualized, aloof, exotic, and changeable, and it elicited a passionate and sometimes even painful form of desire. In The Wanderer Burney explores the human repercussions of this new way of engaging with objects in the marketplace. She reveals, moreover, the extent to which the fetishism of the commodity reflected not just developments within the economy but also political change: under the influence of the French Revolution the charisma once generated by social status was transferred to the economic realm, where, embodied in the commodity, it gave rise to a pleasurable but masochistic reverence. Burney'sargument for the usefulness of economic independence necessarily leads her to appreciate the commodity fetishism she describes: even while she develops a labor theory of value, Burney promotes a mystification of the commodity by insisting on the aloof independence of both labor and its products. Thus, Burney uses the apparent autonomy of things——which Marx decries——as a means to argue for the autonomy of the makers of those things.

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70. Auden’s the Wanderer

The Explicator ◽

10.1080/00144940.1970.11482926 ◽

1970 ◽

Vol 28 (8) ◽

pp. 132-136

Author(s):

Duncan Robertson

Keyword(s):

The Wanderer

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At World's Edge: Post/Coloniality, Charles Maturin, and the Gothic Wanderer

Nineteenth-Century Literature ◽

10.1525/ncl.2011.65.4.513 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 65 (4) ◽

pp. 513-547 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Laura Doyle

Keyword(s):

The Caribbean ◽

Political Investments ◽

The Wanderer

Laura Doyle, “At World's Edge: Post/Coloniality, Charles Maturin, and the Gothic Wanderer” (pp. 513–547) The Gothic text has been shown to represent colonialism's crimes through its literary tropes of imprisonment, terror, rape, and tyranny. This essay takes a further step to propose that Gothic texts also register the historical resistance to colonialism's crimes. That is, they refer to anti-colonial insurgency—in Ireland, India, the Caribbean, and elsewhere—in the process evincing ambivalent anxieties about global, imperial instability. After reviewing the Gothic‘s entanglement with discourses of both liberation and barbarism, reflective of its contradictory political investments, the essay focuses on Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer (1820) to demonstrate the ways in which Gothic texts are structured against insurgency even as, in their “wandering,” haunted figures, they unveil a world in turmoil.

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