When Walter Bagehot declared in 1864 that “panic” had become virtually an economic term, he articulated what Judith Halberstam refers to as “a Gothic economy,” a condition in which the “logic” of capitalism transforms “even the most supernatural of images into material images of capitalism itself.” Many critics point out that it is no coincidence that fiction became the most popular genre at the same time that capitalism's construction of reality required that a new discourse be developed around “the economy.” Academic studies of nineteenth-century British economics vis-à-vis literature also assume that in the Victorian period economics fashions fictions, and fiction produces economic realities. Fashionable cultural studies chiasms, of which the previous statement is one, are themselves illustrations of a Gothic economy in which different ideological modes or ontological entities haunt their others.