Description

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The Necromantics dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions “necromantic literature” at a nineteenth-century intersection between sentimental historiography, medical electricity, imperial gothic monsters, and the Irish Literary Revival, contending that these unghostly bodies resist critical assumptions about the always-haunting power of history.

By considering Irish Revival texts within the broader scope of nineteenth-century necromantic works, The Necromantics challenges Victorian studies’ tendency to merge Irish and English national traditions into a single British whole, as well as Irish studies’ postcolonial efforts to cordon off a distinct Irish canon. Fox thus forges new connections between conflicting political, formal, and historical traditions. In doing so, she proposes necromantic literature as a model for a contemporary reparative reading practice that can reanimate nineteenth-century texts with new aesthetic affinities, demonstrating that any effective act of reading will always be an effort of reanimation.

About the Author

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Renée Fox is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Praise For…

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“Fox’s transformative interventions into Victorian studies and Irish studies persuasively reject necromancy as merely a feature of marginal gothic writing and instead realize it as a central literary strategy for potent theorizations of history, form, and distinctly political imaginaries.” —Amy Martin, author of Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland

“The Necromantics is a powerfully argued account of the rhetoric and representation of reanimation in the nineteenth century. Fox’s important decision to take Victorian Irish literature seriously in its own right is both revolutionary and welcome.” —Patrick R. O’Malley, author of Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland

“This work is an engaging and nuanced discussion of the ongoing literary urge to resurrect the past for contemporary purposes. Fox’s exploration of these ethical questions of reanimation is particularly effective in the context of Irish Revivalism … Its engaging style, as well as Fox’s delightfully quippy asides, make this an accessible and enjoyable study of the consistent through-line of English and Irish Victorian necromantics and a vibrant intervention in the continuing conversation of reparative reading practices.” —Zan Cammack, Nineteenth-Century Contexts