By Renée Fox
The Necromantics dwells on the literal afterlives of history. Reading the reanimated corpses—monstrous, metaphorical, and occasionally merely electrified—that Mary Shelley, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, W.B. Yeats, Bram Stoker, and others bring to life in their works, Renée Fox argues that these undead figures embody the present’s desire to remake the past in its own image.
Fox positions “necromantic literature”—literature preoccupied with reanimated bodies—at a nineteenth-century intersection between sentimental historiography, medical electricity, imperial gothic monster stories, and the Irish Literary Revival, contending that these unghostly bodies resist critical assumptions about the always-haunting power of history.