Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-x

   PDF

2. Introduction

   • Jolene Zigarovich

   Pages 1-22

3. “A Laboriously Constructed Skeleton”: Retrospection, Loss, and Obituary in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette

   • Jolene Zigarovich

   Pages 23-55

4. “It Sounds as Hollow as a Coffin”: The Empty Tomb in Bleak House

   • Jolene Zigarovich

   Pages 57-84

5. Wilkie Collins, Narrativity, and Epitaph

   • Jolene Zigarovich

   Pages 85-117

6. Memorialization and Endlessness in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend

   • Jolene Zigarovich

   Pages 119-138

7. Edwin Drood: The Preeminent Missing Body

   • Jolene Zigarovich

   Pages 139-156

8. Back Matter

   Pages 157-199

   PDF

This book asks why Brontë, Dickens, and Collins saw the narrative act as a series of textual murders and resurrections? Drawing on theorists such as Derrida, Blanchot, and de Man, Zigarovich maintains that narrating death was important to the understanding of absence, separation, and displacement in an industrial and destabilized culture.

• Charles Dickens
• Jacques Derrida
• Narrative
• Victorian era
• British and Irish Literature

"A sustained and brilliant meditation on the deep intimacy between death and fiction-making. Death is distant, other, never truly our own, and accessible only as a representation the representation of the other's death as ours. Zigarovich's readings demonstrate how the novels of Brontë, Dickens, and Collins render anxieties about mortality inseparable from questions of language and representation, while remaining scrupulously attentive to the material culture out of which these narratives arose. This book contributes decisively to our understanding of the culture as well as the literature of the Victorian era." - Marc Redfield, professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brown University

"Empty tombs, missing corpses, ghostly epitaphs, the rhetoric of loss these are some of the topics that Zigarovich explores with subtlety and theoretical sophistication in her fine study of major novels by Brontë, Dickens, and Collins." - John O. Jordan, professor of English, University of California, Santa Cruz

'These wonderfully lively musings on the Victorian cult of death add significantly to the study of both an historical commonplace and of its uses in five exemplary novels.' - Edgar Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University

Jolene Zigarovich is a research assistant professor in the Department of English at Claremont Graduate University.

Policies and ethics