Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- Introduction: The Relic -- Introduction -- 1 "With My Hair in Crystal": Commemorative Hair Jewelry and the Entombed Saint in Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1748) -- 2 "You Know Me Then": The Relic versus the Real in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) -- Introduction -- 3 "All the Horrors of Friendship": Counting the Bodies in Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744) and Volume the Last (1753) -- 4 "It Is All for You!": Dying for Love in Samuel Richardson's The History of Sir Charles Grandison (1753) -- 5 " 'Tis at Least a Memorial for Those Who Survive": The It-Narrator, Death Writing, and the Ghostwriter in Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) -- Conclusion: Death and the Novel -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
Summary
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's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; Sarah Fielding's David Simple and Volume the Last; Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling; and Ann Radcliffe's The 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
