The Undead’s Capitalist World-System

World-gothic as a project (where the hyphen indicates a world-systems relational perspective) is not meant to simply expand our horizon, by studying gothic that arises beyond the culture industries of the United States and Europe; it looks to redraw the terms and frames of reference used. A world-gothic approach does not simply seek to highlight non-American-European productions within already existing Eurocentric literary categories, lineages of influence, and definition by generic traits. World-gothic looks instead to change our perspective of how we understand gothic, even for those works already long studied and taught. Using the example of the undead, this chapter examines the time and place of gothic as registering the spasms of the capitalist world-system.