Feeling at a Loss:
Feeling at a Loss:
Theft and Affect in George Lippard
This chapter argues that the sensationalist “city mystery” novels of George Lippard work to link the affective power of gothic sensationalism to a radical critique of possessive market society. It shows that Lippard’s urban exposés work to induce in his readers a phenomenology of theft, a feeling of what it is like to have property stolen. Adapting Silvan Tomkins’ groundbreaking taxonomy of affect, the chapter demonstrates how Lippard cultivates a form of “theft-distress,” or kleptophobia, specifically through his representation of urban space. His novels invert the standard gothic architecture of enclosure and entrapment in favor of a frightening, and market-generated, permeability and perforation. This affective strategy was particularly compelling for Lippard’s working-class readers, the chapter concludes, because it creatively appropriates the “capitalist-as-thief” imagery so popular with the 1840s labor press and with socialist thinkers like Thomas Skidmore and Pierre Proudhon.
Keywords: George Lippard, sensationalism, city mystery, urban gothic, property, theft, affect, phenomenology, urban space, working-class
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