Class rather than race powered M.R. James’s ghost stories

Evidence

If the libidinal motor of Lovecraft’s horror was race, in the case of James it was class. For James scholars, contact with the anomalous was usually mediated by the “lower classes”, which he portrayed as lacking in intellect but in possession of a deeper knowledge of weird lore. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1120

Categorization

• XREF: Points toward a comparative essay lens on how fear genres encode social hierarchies — could pair with material on how Victorian class anxiety fed supernatural fiction. — connects to: M. R. James’s lower-class characters sense ghosts quicker than his learned scholars — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1121
• SEED: Essay angle: reading horror/supernatural fiction’s subtext through who is cast as the knowledge-holder of the uncanny — serving class vs race coding.
• DEEPTHINKING: The condensed thesis that horror genres select a social axis (race vs class) as their libidinal motor, and that subaltern groups are portrayed as holders of forbidden knowledge, is a dense idea worth sitting with.

Broader Connections

• M. R. James’s lower-class characters sense ghosts quicker than his learned scholars #exemplifies (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1121