Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Narrative Mourning explores death and its relics as they appear within the confines of the eighteenth-century British novel. It argues that the cultural disappearance of the dead/dying body and the introduction of consciousness as humanitys newfound soul found expression in fictional representations of the relic (object) or relict (person). In the six novels examined in this monographSamuel Richardson's Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; Sarah Fielding's David Simple and Volume the Last; Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling; and Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolphothe appearance of the relic/relict signals narrative mourning and expresses (often obliquely) changing cultural attitudes toward the dead.

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