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This work explores how late nineteenth-century literature employed supernatural themes to understand and critique the emerging corporate capitalist economy.

May 31, 2026Open Access

Positive Mystification: Occult Economics in American Literature, 1865-1913

Key Points

This work explores how late nineteenth-century literature employed supernatural themes to understand and critique the emerging corporate capitalist economy.
Analyzed literary works by Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
Investigated the interconnectedness of economic theories and supernatural phenomena using historical texts.
Examined genres characterized by the supernatural to uncover economic implications.
Literary analyses reveal a recurrent theme of economic dislocation portrayed through supernatural elements.
Demonstrated connections between theorizations of marginalist economics and psychical research.
Highlighted how writers utilized ghostly narratives to critique and understand the complexities of modern economic life.

Abstract

Positive Mystification: Occult Economics in American Literature, 1865-1930 argues that cultural works of the late nineteenth century turned to the supernatural to represent, theorize, and reshape the economic dispensation that emerged in the United States in the decades between the Civil War and the 1913 Federal Reserve Act. Across this period, a consolidated corporate capitalism decisively displaced an antebellum political economy centered on localized market competition. While a common narrative of modernity associates this development with what Max Weber terms the “disenchantment of the world,” this project argues that cultural works of the period frequently ascribed an uncanny enchantment to an economy newly characterized by opaque corporate trusts, the intensifying power of the uncannily immaterial force of finance, and the unruly consumer desires incited by access to a dizzying number of commodities. Writers such as Henry James, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen Crane, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman all emphasize an eerie unreality resulting from the ostensibly disenchanting force of economic exigency, and leverage ghost stories, automatic writing, and other genres and forms inflected by the supernatural to probe how this new economic order reshaped phenomena such as property, labor, race, and gender. Readings of these writers’ overlapping paranormal and economic investigations are buttressed by an account of unexpected resonances between theorizations of economics and the supernatural in the period. Engaging deeply with marginalist economics and psychical research, this project demonstrates how both drew on the physiology of sense perception to support their accounts of economic behavior and supernatural phenomena. Illuminating these occulted affinities, this project elucidates how writers used the supernatural as a generative mode of thinking about the American economy in the late nineteenth century, and suggests that we might find in these texts means to reimagine our own economic order.

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