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Palgrave Macmillan

Life, Death, and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century

  • Book
  • © 2022

Overview

Editors:
  1. Lucy Cogan

    1. NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland

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  2. Michelle O'Connell

    1. University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

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  • Brings together a range of perspectives on gender, economics, politics, and psychology of the nineteenth century
  • Examines ways in which death is ever-present in nineteenth-century culture
  • Considers the relationship between science and the gothic

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Table of contents (11 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
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  2. Introduction: Testing the Boundaries of Being in the Long Nineteenth Century

    • Lucy Cogan, Michelle O’Connell
    Pages 1-27

  4. Death’s Embrace

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 117-117
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    2. He Does Not Suffer Now: Death and Citizenship in the National Tale

      • Matthew L. Reznicek
      Pages 119-137

    3. “Thy paleness makes me glad”: Death, Sympathy, and the Body in Keats’s Isabella

      • Greta Colombani
      Pages 139-163

    4. Poe In Extremis

      • Robert Miles
      Pages 165-182

  6. Back Matter

    Pages 275-280
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Keywords

About this book

This book explores how the writers, poets, thinkers, historians, scientists, dilettantes and frauds of the long-nineteenth century addressed the “limit cases” regarding human existence that medicine continuously uncovered as it stretched the boundaries of knowledge. These cases cast troubling and distorted shadows on the culture, throwing into relief the values, vested interests, and power relations regarding the construction of embodied life and consciousness that underpinned the understanding of what it was to be alive in the long nineteenth century. Ranging over a period from the mid-eighteenth century through to the first decade of the twentieth century—an era that has been called the ‘Age of Science’—the essays collected here consider the cultural ripple effects of those previously unimaginable revolutions in science and medicine on humanity’s understanding of being.

Reviews

"Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century is an informative, wide-ranging, yet focused investigation into the profound effects of medical science on the ways that life and death were understood and experienced at their very limits. This excellent interdisciplinary collection of essays will be useful to anyone interested in the literary and cultural phenomena of the period, especially regarding matters medical, both physical and psychological." (Clark Lawlor, University of Northumbria, U.K., Principal Investigator for the Leverhulme Trust Major Projects Writing Doctors: Representation and Medical Personality ca. 1660-1832 and Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832)

Editors and Affiliations

  • NUI Galway, Galway, Ireland

    Lucy Cogan

  • University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Michelle O'Connell

About the editors

Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in English (Long-Eighteenth Century) at NUI Galway, Ireland. She has published a monograph on William Blake entitled Blake and the Failure of Prophecy (2021) and a range of articles and essays on gender and sexuality in Blake’s writing, and on women’s writing in the long-eighteenth century.

Michelle O’Connell is Lecturer in Romantic Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has published essays and articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century poetry and fiction, and is currently working on a full-length study of the construction of the nineteenth-century female poetic subject. 




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