The Living and the Dead in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture

Module code: EN3209

Relationships between the living and the dead altered profoundly in the nineteenth century, shaped by medical advances, growing secularism, and changing mourning practices. This module surveys the genres and forms that characterised the complex literary interactions between the living, the dead, and the undead, in texts that stage presence and absence, familiarity and otherness, exploitation, longing, desire, menace, and imagined reciprocity. The set reading will acquaint you with a wide variety of writing about the dead, from high cultural forms such as elegy, to popular genres including ghost stories and gothic fiction.