Reading “The Shining” through “Gothic Precarity”: Economic Dread and American Fiction

This study investigates the intersection of economic instability and the Gothic in American literature, utilizing the theory analyzed by Timothy Rideout in Gothic Precarity: Fears and Anxieties of the Twentieth Century (2025) to re-examine Stephen King’s masterpiece, The Shining (1977). Beginning with a historical perspective, the thesis examines how U.S. Gothic literature evolved from the Puritan anxieties of the Early Republic to the fragmented alienations of Modernism, maintaining an underlying connection with the material crises of its respective eras. Subsequently, the study outlines the theoretical framework of Gothic Precarity, exploring how the existential, labor, and social instability of contemporary capitalism has translated into new literary formulas of fear. The final section offers a critical reading of Stephen King’s The Shining. Through an analysis of the socio-economic context of the 1970s – a decade deeply marked by recession and the social changes – the novel is reinterpreted as the archetype of Gothic Precarity. The Overlook Hotel becomes a claustrophobic space where financial distress, unemployment, and Jack Torrance's wounded masculinity converge into monstrous violence, ultimately transforming economic threat into the primary engine of terror towards his family.