Carlyle and the Economics of Terror

Thomas Carlyle's difficult and obscure prose - the bane of every reader who has attempted to come to terms with his works - has often been interpreted as a reflection of the author's temperament or idiosyncrasies. Mary Desaulniers, however, argues that Carlyle's language is a deliberate strategy for revisioning language and places it within an "economics" of representation. By situating his prose within the Gothic tradition, with its history of resistance to linguistic transparency,...
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Thomas Carlyle's difficult and obscure prose - the bane of every reader who has attempted to come to terms with his works - has often been interpreted as a reflection of the author's temperament or idiosyncrasies. Mary Desaulniers, however, argues that Carlyle's language is a deliberate strategy for revisioning language and places it within an "economics" of representation. By situating his prose within the Gothic tradition, with its history of resistance to linguistic transparency, Desaulniers makes the provocative claim that in The French Revolution Carlyle uses revisionary Gothicism as a linguistic vehicle for economic and political issues.