Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

This literary and cultural study explores the practice in nineteenth-century Britain of treasuring objects that had belonged to the dead.

List of contents

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.

About the author

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).

Summary

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.

Product details

• Authors: Deborah Lutz, Deborah (Long Island University Lutz, Lutz Deborah
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press ELT
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 31.08.2017
• EAN: 9781107434394
• ISBN: 978-1-107-43439-4
• No. of pages: 261
• Series: Cambridge Studies in Nineteent; Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > English linguistics / literary studies; Social sciences, law, business > Sociology > General, dictionaries; Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900, English, c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900