The fifth chapter considers the third-quarter-century synthesis of the two rival “Freudian” and “Marxist” Modernisms considered in the preceding chapters, and ways in which post-war theory and practice designated “Late Modernist” would be (very successfully) demonised by successive waves of post-modernist critics, particularly in relation to architecture. This chapter will consider the profound reaction from Brutalist architecture that anticipated the general turn to post-modernisms in other disciplines and question many of the widespread assumptions that have developed with regard to this. The ferocity of the debate suggests that the issues at stake here are not merely practical. Those for and against seem to share an irrational faith in the power of the buildings to exert control over the communities they contain, whether for good or for ill, in a manner that must recall the fantastically weird responses to Hawksmoor’s baroque churches in psycho-geographical fiction of this era. The underlying causes of this uncanny effect are identified, analysed, and traced back to the architectural theory that designed such spaces and to the economic theory that required their production. Finally, a peculiar subgenre of the anti-socialist dystopia is defined that is, specifically, anti-Keynesian.

The sixth chapter will trace the persistence of Promethean horror tropes beyond the apparent collapse of the Late Modernist paradigm, into the neoliberal and post-modernist era. Expanding on issues relating to the crisis in Enlightenment humanist thinking raised in preceding chapters, and addressing concerns central to post-humanist theory relating to the consequences that must follow for human identity arising from the development of artificial intelligence, this chapter outlines an entirely new approach: suggesting that the famous Turing Test has been consistently misinterpreted, and that we are now in a position to see that it is designed to gauge an “uncanny” effect – that is, the extent to which a system for modelling social behaviour can outperform an older, tried-and-tested system for producing such models (i.e. human personalities: a social construct that each of us attempts, with varying success, to perform). The consequences of failing to recognise this are that we are likely to remain “taken in” by such models when they are applied to other aspects of our lives, limiting our freedom of action. While systems for predicting political and economic phenomena are widely believed to have fallen out of favour in the final quarter of the twentieth century, this chapter will demonstrate that such systems actually remain integral to our contemporary economic system, in the form of scenario planning and computer modelling, with the failure to recognise this having often devastating effects.

The third chapter traces this “architectural uncanny” back to London’s earliest inter-war Modernist architecture, showing that this “functionalist” architectural aesthetic is as ripe for uncanny sensations as the eighteenth-century “rationalist” architecture considered in the previous chapter, and for much the same reason: being committed to an act of dissimulation in order to see off a perceived threat to Enlightenment values posed by the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and the psychoanalytical theory of Sigmund Freud: the rival tradition of Modernist theory and practice that emerges from what one might call the radical empiricist or Romantic tradition of Western philosophy.

The introduction will discuss the significance of the Prometheus myth, beginning with its most familiar manifestation in English literature, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein. Having noted that Promethean horror is relatively rare in English-language literature, where the term gothic is near synonymous with horror, the introduction will note the proliferation of Promethean tropes over the course of the twentieth century and suggest that changing perceptions towards Modernism are the primary reason for this shift, outlining some of the approaches developed in the chapters.

The fourth chapter shows how the tradition of Modernism in which one might place Lubetkin (with writers T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis) would itself be demonised by writers within the Romantic-Modern tradition, exploring how fear and hostility provoked by the Promethean energies of the USSR (and by the New Linguistic Doctrine of the Soviet linguist Nikolai Marr in particular) manifest themselves in perhaps the most memorable demonisation of a symbol of Enlightenment: the all-seeing Eye of Sauron on its pyramid. Deeply committed to the discipline of philology that had inspired Schopenhauer (and the radical empiricism that followed), J. R. R. Tolkien is revealed to be an unlikely combatant in the great culture war between these two estranged philosophies that defined the era of High Modernism.

The final chapter will examine twenty-first-century novels by Reza Negarestani, Stephen King and Nnedi Okorafor, in order to assess whether the “turn” towards Enlightenment horror identified in this book is likely to prove an enduring phenomenon or whether its moment might now already be passed, as memories of the hopes and fears provoked in equal measure by the Promethean ambitions of Modernist practitioners and theorists begin to fade with time, with the Golden Age of Western capitalism (as the historian Eric Hobsbawm termed it) receding ever further into the past.

Having examined the building and decorating of the urban house, this chapter explores how the artisan approached marketing and selling real estate. As the first sustained analysis of property advertising in the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world, this chapter first considers how regional variations and social demographics (aristocratic audiences in London and Dublin compared with merchant audiences in Boston and Philadelphia) dictated the form and content of property notices, reflecting on issues such as location, quality of structural and decorative finish, convenience and decorum. But while house building and house selling were principally economic activities, representing the motivating force for building mechanics to enter the real estate market, the evidence from property advertisements reveals that builders were cognizant of the semantics of advertising rhetoric and employed a vocabulary that emulated that of auctioneers, luxury goods manufacturers and other polite retailers.

In a satirical postscript to the preface of The architectural remembrancer (1751), concerning ‘the peculiar Fondness of Novelty, which reigns at present’, author Robert Morris announced a new publication on behalf of ‘a Friend’:

As a very pointed satire about contemporary books of architectural design, bearing titles such as New designs for Chinese bridges, temples, triumphal arches, garden seats, palings, obelisks, termini’s, &c. (1750), this spoke directly to the link between modernity and novelty; the humour residing in the improper use of exotic, non- classical decorative styles and their signifying or representative capacities. That this was not an entirely facetious parody is borne out by an advertisement published in the New York Mercury of 25 September 1758: