Abstract
This essay examines the uncanny as a literary mood emergent in the late eighteenth century which enabled writers to explore the notion of a hidden self, one that acts autonomously and is largely outside the purview of reason. Such a self was especially frightening after the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars undermined belief in man's capacity for rational self-government. Both Wieland and Prometheus Unbound dramatize the problem that the unconscious posed for liberal politics, depicting the mind's profound susceptibility to superstition and bigotry in terms of the ventriloquial uncanny: mysterious voices that test the self's capacity for rational accountability.
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