Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel [Paperback]

Narrative Mourning explores death and its relics as they appear within the confines of the eighteenth-century British novel. It argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body and the introduction of consciousness as humanity’s newfound soul found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person). In the six novels examined in this monograph—Samuel Richardson'sClarissaandSir Charles Grandison; Sarah Fielding'sDavid SimpleandVolume the Last; Henry Mackenzie'sThe Man of Feeling; and Ann Radcliffe'sThe Mysteries of Udolpho—the appearance of the relic/relict signals narrative mourning and expresses (often obliquely) changing cultural attitudes toward the dead.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press. Narrative Mourningargues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body in eighteenth-century Britain found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person) within certain British novels. These relics/relicts exist as material signs of loss and as compensation for loss; they exist as surrogates for the absent (living, dead, or dying) and as reliquaries for their “psychic” essences.KATHLEEN M. OLIVERis the author ofSamuel Richardson, Dress, and Discourse, and her essays on Daniel Defoe, Sarah Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Frances Sheridan, Charlotte Smith, and William Wycherley have appeared in peer-reviewed journals and scholarly collections. In 2002, she received the Emilie du Châtelet Award for Independent Scholarship, bestowed by the Women’s Caucus of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.
 
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