Houses of Terror, Castles of Despair: Nightmarish Necropoetics and Necropolitics in the Victorian Workhouse
Carol Margaret Davison
Abstract:This essay brings Achille Mbembe’s intellectually trenchant theory of necropower to bear on the early Victorian era’s most despised and iconic institution, known as the workhouse, arguably one of the most preeminent emblems of democracy’s nocturnal body located within Britain. Regarded by many of its critics as enacting the Utilitarian, inhumane, and ‘mechanistic’ treatment of the poor (Crowther, ‘Workhouse’ 194), the workhouse was frequently portrayed using the Gothic mode as a necropolitical institution, a d… Show more
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