The topic of this intriguing study is “necromantic literature;” that is, nineteenth-century English and Irish literature concerned with the reanimation of the dead. Fox's thesis is that novelists and poets use resurrected bodies to (re)imagine the past and explore what she calls the “resuscitative” role of literature (6−12). Contrary to what readers might expect, The Necromantics does not focus exclusively on Gothic narratives about reanimated corpses, but also examines texts in which reanimation operates at a purely figurative level. Fox is principally interested in the relationship between history and literature and the extent to which writing (or “reanimating”) the past is necessarily an imaginative undertaking. Yet while some chapters concentrate on questions of history and historiography, others take up broader questions of literary representation and, in the second half of the book, issues of colonial politics. As Fox acknowledges, the study brings together an “unlikely” group of prose works and poems that form “an awkwardly articulated body” (34). However, the eclectic nature of the study, far from being a shortcoming, is what makes it worth reading.
The first half of The Necromantics is devoted to English authors and texts. Chapter 1 deals, unsurprisingly, with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), the work that first comes to mind when one thinks of nineteenth-century resurrection narratives. What readers often miss, according to Fox, is that Frankenstein is not actually about reanimating the dead, but rather it is about the creation of new life. Fox's point is that the Creature is invested with no personal history. His consciousness begins when he is jolted into being, and therefore his identity is not shaped by memories of a past life (or lives). In this respect, Fox contends, Frankenstein differs from “Valerius, the Reanimated Roman” (1819) and “Roger Dodsworth, the Reanimated Englishman” (1826), lesser-known reanimation stories by Shelley in which individuals from the past are revived and exist anachronistically in the present. The stories reveal Shelley's deep interest in Romantic approaches to history and the shortcomings of sentimental historiography, themes that are not, according to Fox, explored in Frankenstein. However, if the Creature in Shelley's Gothic novel is not a historical being, that idea was introduced in subsequent stage and film adaptations. Importantly, Frankenstein is established as an anchor text for The Necromantics less because of how the novel treats the theme of reanimation per se than because of its own afterlife in the nineteenth century and beyond. Accordingly, the chapter ends with a discussion of how adaptations ranging from Peake's 1823 play to Branagh's 1994 film invest Frankenstein with historical meanings not found in Shelley's novel.
In chapters 2 and 3, Fox analyzes texts by Charles Dickens and Robert Browning, respectively, arguing that the authors use the reanimation trope to engage self-consciously with issues of literary representation. In the Dickens chapter, Great Expectations (1861) and Our Mutual Friend (1865) are understood as meta-commentaries about the limits of literary realism. Pip's first-person retrospective narration is framed as his attempt to reanimate the past. Placing great importance on the early reference to Pip imaginatively conjuring up his family after reading their gravestones, Fox uses the term “epitaphic realism” (34 and elsewhere) to describe his narratorial attempts to bring the past to life and assume control over his identity. In Our Mutual Friend, similarly, reanimation is seen to operate figuratively: Fox argues that references to galvanic animation betray Dickens's suspicions about the possibility of historical objectivity and authentic representation. Next, she reads Browning's verse novel The Ring and the Book (1868−69) together with several short dramatic monologues to explore the author's poetic reanimation of the dead. Particularly compelling are the sections on the murdered Pompilia's posthumous narration and Fox's various contextualizations of Browning's “necropoetics” in terms of Romantic theories of poetic creation, the historian Jules Michelet's view of history as a “resurrection” of the past, and Victorian “projects of aesthetic resurrection” (113) including spirit photography.
The last chapters turn to writers of the Irish Literary Revival and to questions of colonialism. Continuing the previous chapter's focus on poetry, chapter 4 examines Yeats's “The Wanderings of Oisin” (1889) alongside his collections of Irish myths and folk stories. Fox understands Yeats's imaginative recuperation of the Irish past (figured through Oisin's own journeys to the land of the dead) as self-aware meditations on the period's resurgence of interest in Celtic history. Fox also frames the collecting and reviving of Irish stories in terms of the rise of museums in the period. In particular, she reads Yeats's texts as Irish nationalist responses to “museum poems” (143−53) by Keats, Rossetti, Hardy, and other British writers.
Chapter 5 is the only one besides the first chapter to examine a narrative that literally portrays the reanimation of the dead. Fox returns to the realm of Gothic horror with Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903), a novel about a disastrous attempt to revive the mummy of an ancient Egyptian queen. Drawing comparisons to Stoker's famous vampire novel, Fox characterizes The Jewel of Seven Stars as an example of imperial Gothic. In The Jewel of Seven Stars, she demonstrates, a parallel exists between the British characters’ relationship to the Egyptian mummy and British colonial control of Ireland. Even more thought-provokingly, Fox delves back into the previous chapter's consideration of the Celtic revival movement to argue that Stoker offers a cautionary tale about the problems of building a modern Irish identity from ancient myths. Reading “against the grain” (177) of Stoker's story about the reanimation of Queen Tera, Fox interprets it as a critique of Irish revivalism.
The study concludes, entertainingly, with an epilogue that examines recent reimaginings of nineteenth-century novels. Monster mash-ups like Mansfield Park and Mummies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and Jane Slayre reanimate old works in surprising ways and exemplify for Fox “resuscitative reading run amok” (224). Overall, The Necromantics brings together an unexpected mix of texts with illuminating results. Particularly welcome is the sustained attention given to Irish literature, as well as the decision to understand reanimation as more than just a Gothic trope. Henceforth, Fox's study will be necessary reading for anyone wishing to engage with the topic of reanimation, and it will also be of interest to scholars working on the individual texts that Fox so interestingly analyzes.
