Gothic death 1740-1914 : a literary history / Andrew Smith.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Smith, Andrew, 1964- author.

Series:

Manchester Gothic (Manchester, England).

Manchester Gothic

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English--History and criticism.

Gothic fiction (Literary genre), English.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (210 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2016.

Summary:

The focus in this book is on how the dead and dying were represented in Gothic texts between 1740 and 1914 - between Graveyard poetry and the mass death occasioned by the First World War. The corpse might seem to have an obvious place in the Gothic imaginary but, as we shall see, the corpse so often refuses to function as a formal Gothic prop and in order to understand why this occurs we need to explore what the corpse figuratively represented in the Gothic during the long nineteenth century. Representations of death often provide a vehicle for other contemplations than just death. A central aim of this study is to explore how images of death and dying were closely linked to models of creativity, which argues for a new way of looking at aesthetics during the period. Writers explored include Edward Young, Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, James Boaden, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Brontë, George Eliot, Henry Rider Haggard, Bram Stoker and Arthur Machen.

Contents:

Cover; Half-title; Title page; Copyright information; Dedication; Table of contents; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Notes; 1 Touched by the dead: eighteenth-century Gothic poetics ; The elegy: critical overviews; Sensibility; The elegy; Gothic creativity; Death and poetry: seeing the Gothic in the 1790s; Notes; 2 Mourning, memory and melancholy: constructing death constructing death in the 1790s-1820s ; Mourning and memory; Rogers and the importance of memory; Charlotte Smith; Inscriptions of death and the construction of mourning; Constructing the self.

Reanimating the dead: the ethics of memory in The Man of Two LivesNotes; 3 From writing to reading: Poe, Brontë and Eliot; Voicing death: Poe; Life, death and the cosmos; Death and the repeated life; Writing death; Wuthering Heights: knowing death?; Lifting the veil; A science of death; Notes; 4 Gothic death and Dickens: executions, graves and dreams; State killing; Oliver Twist and the Christian uncanny; The culture of the graveyard; Twins and doubles; Dreams, death and the imagination; Drood: decoding death; Notes; 5 Loving the undead: Haggard, Stoker and Wilde.

Haggard: love and death in SheLove and understanding in The Jewel of Seven Stars; Ayesha: The Return of She and dialogues with the dead; Raising the dead: The Lady of the Shroud; Dorian Gray and the imagination; Notes; 6 Decoding the dying: Machen and Stoker; The science of spirits: Henry Drummond; Myers and the subliminal self; Machen's Gothic fragments; Dracula: writers, readers, editors; Notes; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 10 Jul 2026).

Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-206) and index.

ISBN:

9781526101082

1526101084

9781526115256

1526115255

9781526101075

1526101076

OCLC:

967322369