Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

Nineteenth-century Britons treasured objects of daily life that had once belonged to their dead. The love of these keepsakes, which included hair, teeth, and other remains, speaks of an intimacy with the body and death, a way of understanding absence through its materials, which is less widely felt today. Deborah Lutz analyzes relic culture as an affirmation that objects held memories and told stories. These practices show a belief in keeping death vitally intertwined with life - not as memento mori but rather as respecting the singularity of unique beings. In a consumer culture in full swing by the 1850s, keepsakes of loved ones stood out as non-reproducible, authentic things whose value was purely personal. Through close reading of the works of Charles Dickens, Emily Brontë, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, and others, this study illuminates the treasuring of objects that had belonged to or touched the dead.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: lyrical matter; 1. Infinite materiality: Keats, D. G. Rossetti and the Romantics; 2. The miracle of ordinary things: Brontë and Wuthering Heights; 3. The many faces of death masks: Dickens and Great Expectations; 4. The elegy as shrine: Tennyson and 'In Memoriam'; 5. Hair jewelry as congealed time: Hardy and Far from the Madding Crowd; Afterword: death as death; Bibliography.

Über den Autor / die Autorin

Deborah Lutz is an Associate Professor of Victorian Literature and Culture at Long Island University, C. W. Post Campus. She is the author of Pleasure Bound: Victorian Sex Rebels and the New Eroticism (2011) and The Dangerous Lover: Gothic Villains, Byronism, and the Nineteenth-Century Seduction Narrative (2006).

Zusammenfassung

Deborah Lutz investigates the high value the Victorians placed on the artefacts and personal effects of the dead. By close study of works by Emily Brontë, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy, Lutz explores the ways these objects were used in creative narratives for emotional effect.

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Deborah Lutz, Deborah (Long Island University Lutz, Lutz Deborah
• Verlag: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 31.08.2017
• EAN: 9781107434394
• ISBN: 978-1-107-43439-4
• Seiten: 261
• Serien: Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Themen: Belletristik > Lyrik, Dramatik; Geisteswissenschaften, Kunst, Musik > Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft > Englische Sprachwissenschaft / Literaturwissenschaft; Sozialwissenschaften, Recht,Wirtschaft > Soziologie > Allgemeines, Lexika; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, History, English, HISTORY / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural & Social, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, 18th century, c 1700 to c 1799, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900