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Explores Victorian responses to death and burial in literature, journalism, and legal writing.
Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO’s Six Feet Under, quipped, “Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything.” So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: “Taught by death what life should be.”
“This is an ambitious, energetic and rigorous attempt to do that very difficult thing, integrate detailed and historically informed analysis of the documents of nineteenth-century burial reform and of major literary texts into a lucid and complex argument that doesn’t fight shy of contradiction and difficulty.” — Mortality
“Drawing on a vast range of primary sources—official documents, newspapers and periodicals, travel guides—and the work of anthropologists, historians, and the substantial engagements within literary studies dealing with representations of death and the dead, Hotz’s perceptive, engaging, and eloquent study will be welcomed by a range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences.” — CHOICE
“I read this fascinating book with great pleasure. It makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian practices of death and burial and will be an essential supplement to existing studies of the culture of Victorian melancholy and bereavement.” — Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery
Mary Elizabeth Hotz, a member of the Society of the Sacred Heart, is Associate Professor of English at the University of San Diego.
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