Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture - Deborah Lutz

Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture

(Autor)

Buch | Softcover
261 Seiten
2017
Cambridge University Press (Verlag)
978-1-107-43439-4 (ISBN)
38,65 inkl. MwSt
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.
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.

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).

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.

Erscheinungsdatum
Reihe/Serie Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture
Zusatzinfo 16 Halftones, unspecified; 16 Halftones, black and white
Verlagsort Cambridge
Sprache englisch
Maße 150 x 230 mm
Gewicht 390 g
Themenwelt Geschichte Allgemeine Geschichte Neuzeit (bis 1918)
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Anglistik / Amerikanistik
Geisteswissenschaften Sprach- / Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte
Sozialwissenschaften
ISBN-10 1-107-43439-4 / 1107434394
ISBN-13 978-1-107-43439-4 / 9781107434394
Zustand Neuware
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