UC Riverside

The book and the corpse are often curiously sympathetic bodies, a relationship augmented by the tension between their respective rates of decay. Books are intended to – and unless deliberately or accidentally destroyed, do – outlast us. However, while the supposed “death” of the book in the digital age has been a charged cultural debate of the last decade, people have been literally, both ritually and accidentally, treating books like the dead for much longer. “Entangled with the Dead: Burial, Exhumation, and Textual Materiality in British Romanticism” examines how authors at the turn of the nineteenth-century treated literary decay at a time when emerging Enlightenment and Romantic sciences such as botany and geology were introducing a new material record of ruins, remains, and relics in juxtaposition to the historical record. Analyzing how Romantic authors deploy motifs of burial and exhumation to imagine books as vulnerable media objects along that material record, this project shows that in the nineteenth century the ruined book became a mutually constitutive cross-disciplinary object of natural history and the literary record. This project makes visible the conceptual role of the grave as Romantic authors worked to locate literary history within broader material paradigms. Scenes of book burial and exhumation, or other instances in which books and bodies are treated as synecdochical relics, highlight how Romantic writers and their later nineteenth-century readers sought to understand the material pasts and futures of books. Therefore, while the authors under discussion, such as John Keats, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Felicia Hemans, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes, are largely categorized as Romantic, I look across the traditional temporal boundaries of the period to better understand the material dimensions of posterity, canonicity and affective memorialization. Responding to recent calls to treat literary and book history as essential extensions of one another, this project reconceptualizes how we describe the material consequences of posthumousness for Romantic representations of book culture. “Entangled with the Dead” thus contributes to both histories of mortality and the ongoing historicization of media and lived experience necessary to our own emergent digital moment.