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  1. Home
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  3. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture
  • Cited by 46
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
January 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139924887
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139924887
Subjects:
Literature, English Literature 1830-1900
Series:
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (96)
Information

Book description

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.

Reviews

'… Lutz's study invites us to re-consider the centrality of grief and the persistence of mourning across nineteenth-century art and literature.'

Michael J. Sullivan Source: Tennyson Research Bulletin

'… Lutz supplies a fascinating discussion of the many ways besides lockets of hair that Victorians preserved parts of their loved ones’ corpses as relics. … Lutz reveals that death was an intimate part of life for Victorians - not ghastly and Other, as it is for us.'

Sarah Gates Source: Dickens Studies Annual

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