Consuming cultures: Ethnology, art, and the commodity in popular British fiction of the occult, 1885-1915

My dissertation, "Consuming Cultures: Ethnology, Art, and the Commodity in Popular British Fiction of the Occult, 1885-1915," links the works of Henry James, Andrew Lang, H. Rider Haggard, and George Du Maurier to the late-nineteenth-century redefinition of culture--a reconceptualization in which social and cultural critics set both anthropological and aesthetic culture against commodification. By analyzing James's experimental and modernist occult fiction in the context of the cultural criticism of Lang and the popular novels of Haggard and Du Maurier, I explore the ways that supernatural fiction criticizes and yet exemplifies the increasing commodification of culture at the turn of the twentieth century. The categorical opposition between culture and commerce, often described in terms of a dichotomy between the spiritual and the material, fails to account adequately for popular (and commercially profitable) occult fiction. Such novels as Haggard's She and Du Maurier's Trilby-- significant cultural phenomena in their own right--are important case studies of commodified literary artifacts because they address the relationships among people, things, money, and magic in two cultural arenas. These areas-- "primitive" culture and aesthetic (High) culture--were typically idealized as antithetical to commodity relations and a money economy. I argue that in the popular occult fiction of this period anthropological and aesthetic culture, rather than being immune to the encroachments of commodification, are crucially implicated in a money economy. In a corresponding fashion, my analysis shows that "magic" and mystification, rather than dissipating at the touch of commercialization, are at the heart of the commodity. My readings of these popular texts culminate in an analysis of the ghost stories of Henry James, an "elite" writer who found the popular genre of occult fiction a fruitful field in which to explore the interrelations between culture and commodification.