The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature

Honorable Mention, American Council for Irish Studies Donald Murphy Prize for Distinguished First BookThe Necromantics dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses-monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally electrified-that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W. B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present's desire to remake the past in its own image. Fox positions "necromantic literature" 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-haunting power of history. By considering Irish Revival texts within the broader scope of nineteenth-century necromantic works, The Necromantics challenges Victorian studies' tendency to merge Irish and English national traditions into a single British whole, as well as Irish studies' postcolonial efforts to cordon off a distinct Irish canon. Fox thus forges new connections between conflicting political, formal, and historical traditions. In doing so, she proposes necromantic literature as a model for a contemporary reparative reading practice that can reanimate nineteenth-century texts with new aesthetic affinities, demonstrating that any effective act of reading will always be an effort of reanimation.

About the Author :
Renée Fox is Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Review :
"The Necromantics is a powerfully argued account of the rhetoric and representation of reanimation in the nineteenth century. Fox's important decision to take Victorian Irish literature seriously in its own right is both revolutionary and welcome." --Patrick O'Malley, author of Liffey and Lethe: Paramnesiac History in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-Ireland "Fox's transformative interventions into Victorian studies and Irish studies persuasively reject necromancy as merely a feature of marginal gothic writing and instead realize it as a central literary strategy for potent theorizations of history, form, and distinctly political imaginaries." --Amy Martin, author of Alter-Nations: Nationalisms, Terror, and the State in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland "This work is an engaging and nuanced discussion of the ongoing literary urge to resurrect the past for contemporary purposes. Fox's exploration of these ethical questions of reanimation is particularly effective in the context of Irish Revivalism ... Its engaging style, as well as Fox's delightfully quippy asides, make this an accessible and enjoyable study of the consistent through-line of English and Irish Victorian necromantics and a vibrant intervention in the continuing conversation of reparative reading practices." --Zan Cammack, Nineteenth-Century Contexts "The Necromantics brings together an unexpected mix of texts with illuminating results. Particularly welcome is the sustained attention given to Irish literature, as well as the decision to understand reanimation as more than just a Gothic trope. Henceforth, Fox's study will be necessary reading for anyone wishing to engage with the topic of reanimation, and it will also be of interest to scholars working on the individual texts that Fox so interestingly analyzes." --Natalie Neill, Journal of British Studies "Fox's study offers rewarding-indeed revitalizing-new perspectives on how we understand 19th-century authorship, literature, and historiography." --Anne-Julia Zwierlein, Anglistik "This erudite study of reanimation in British and Irish literature and sentimental historiography from the late eighteenth century to the twenty-first century makes a welcome intervention into Victorian studies. ... Fox's extremely well-researched and illuminating study of the necromantic imagination will find eager audiences in scholars and graduate students in the fields of both Irish and British Victorian studies as well as scholars of the gothic and thanatology more generally." --Colleen English, English Studies "Wonderfully sensitive and provocative ... Written with verve and wry humour, [The Necromantics] is as deeply invested in contemporary methodological debate as it is in Victorian poetics." --Gordon Bigelow, Estudios Irlandeses