Economics of Strategy

Carlyle's difficult and obscure prose as often been interpreted as a reflection of the author's temperament or idiosyncracies. 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 claim that in the French revolution, Carlyle uses revisionary Gothicism as a linguistic vehicle for economic and political issues.