Overview
Argues that before there was Gothic fiction there was ‘the Gothic corpse’
Uses the representation of the dead body as a lens on roads taken and not taken by the eighteenth-century novel
Examines work from a variety of writers, from Behn to Dacre
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Table of contents(6 chapters)
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Remains of the Past
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Gothic Negotiations
About this book
Inventing the Gothic Corpse shows how a series of bold experiments in eighteenth-century British realist and Gothic fiction transform the dead body from an instructive icon into a thrill device. For centuries, vivid images of the corpse were used to deliver a spiritual or political message; today they appear regularly in Gothic and horror stories as a source of macabre pleasure. Yael Shapira’s book tracks this change at it unfolds in eighteenth-century fiction, from the early novels of Aphra Behn and Daniel Defoe, through the groundbreaking mid-century works of Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Horace Walpole, to the Gothic fictions of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, Charlotte Dacre and Minerva Press authors Isabella Kelly and Mrs. Carver.
In tracing this long historical arc, Shapira illuminates a hidden side of the history of the novel: the dead body, she shows, helps the fledgling literary form confront its own controversial ability to entertain. Her close scrutiny of fictional corpses across the long eighteenth century reveals how the dead body functions as a test of the novel’s intentions, a chance for novelists to declare their allegiances in the battle between the didactic and the “merely” pleasurable.
Authors and Affiliations
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Department of English Literature and Linguistics, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel
Yael Shapira
About the author
Yael Shapira is a lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Linguistics at Bar-Ilan University in Israel. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Life, Narrative, Women’s Writing and elsewhere. Her current research focuses on the forgotten Gothic novels of the Minerva Press in the Romantic period.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Inventing the Gothic Corpse
Book Subtitle: The Thrill of Human Remains in the Eighteenth-Century Novel
Authors: Yael Shapira
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76484-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-76483-2Published: 04 June 2018
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-09499-7Published: 26 January 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-76484-9Published: 22 May 2018
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 265
Topics: Eighteenth-Century Literature, Fiction, British and Irish Literature