The Necromantics by Rene Fox

The Necromantics by Rene Fox

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, Ren e 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.