Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Western European Studies
Episode: Renée Fox, "The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature" (Ohio State UP, 2023)
Description: The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature (Ohio State UP, 2023) dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpsesâmonstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrifiedâthat Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W.âŻB. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, RenĂ©e Fox argues that these undead figures embody the presentâs desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions ânecromantic literatureâ 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-haun...