Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in English (Long-Eighteenth Century) at NUI Galway, Ireland. She has published a monograph on William Blake entitled Blake and the Failure of Prophecy (2021) and a range of articles and essays on gender and sexuality in Blake's writing, and on women's writing in the long-eighteenth century. Michelle O'Connell is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published essays and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a full-length study of the construction of the nineteenth-century female poetic subject.

Introduction Lucy Cogan & Michelle O'Connell.- Part I: Materialism, Bodies and Embodiment.- Chapter 1: 'Poe, Lucretius and Materialism.' Robert Miles.- Chapter 2: 'The Body Impoverished: The Place of Gender and Race in Poverty Narratives of the 1880s.' Lucy Hartley.- Chapter 3: 'The Horrors of Still Life: Taxidermy and the Gothic in the Long Nineteenth Century.' Elizabeth Effinger.- Chapter 4:  '"Thy paleness makes me glad": Death, Sympathy and the Body in Keats's Isabella.' Greta Columbani.- Part II: Altered States.- Chapter 5: '"The Dangers of Vinous Potation": Tracing the Influence of Erasmus Darwin's Zoonomia on Representations of Drunkenness in the Writings of Maria Edgeworth.' Lucy Cogan.- Chapter 6: 'Wandering Attention: Victorian Daydreaming and the Boundaries of Consciousness.' Athena Vrettos.- Chapter 7: 'Leonora Piper: Mediumship, Gender, and the Societies for Psychical Research.' Dara Downey.- Chapter 8: '"[T]o Feel Powers at Work in the Common Air Unfelt by Other": Receptiveness and the Vanishing Body in Victorian Literature and Culture.' Greta Perletti.- Part III: Gender and the Limits of Sex.- Chapter 9: 'Heroism Reclaimed: Age, Masculinity and Genitourinary Medicine in Edwardian London.' Kieran Fitzpatrick.- Chapter 10: 'Intersex Boundaries: Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century Hermaphroditic Bodies.' Jolene Zigarovich.- Chapter 11: '"Absurd Speculations": The Morbid Uterus in Haeckel, von Hartmann and Thomas Hardy's "Prenatal Poetics."' Natalie Mann.