UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Entangled with the Dead: Burial, Exhumation, and Textual Materiality in British Romanticism Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0bt7d0v9 Author Roberson, Jessica Anne Publication Date 2017 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ 4.0 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Entangled With the Dead: Burial, Exhumation, and Textual Materiality in British Romanticism A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jessica Anne Roberson June 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Adriana Craciun, Chairperson Dr. Susan Zieger Dr. Robb Hernandez Copyright by Jessica Anne Roberson 2017 The Dissertation of Jessica Anne Roberson is approved: _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgments I want to thank everyone who played some part in seeing this dissertation to fruition. First, I am indebted to my dissertation chair and advisor, Professor Adriana Craciun, for her thoughtful and generous guidance throughout my graduate career. She has the rare and valuable ability to be both rigorous and kind; while she challenges her students to rise to high expectations, she also helps them to see the value of the process and the worth of their accomplishments. My work would not be what it is today without her, and neither would my sanity. I must also thank Professor Susan Zieger, who has been an invaluable mentor during my time at UCR. She always asks questions that push and expand my work in ways I did not foresee, and encouraged me to publish and get my work out in public when I might have held it back out of anxiety. Professor Robb Hernandez’s conversation and constant good humor were also instrumental to the completion of this dissertation, particularly his encouragement to embrace my identity as “Grave Girl.” Thank you all for seeing value in my work and supporting this dissertation to the end. I also want to acknowledge the early advice and support of Dr. Alison Dushane, in whose undergraduate Romanticism survey at the University of Arizona I first read The Last Man, and began to form the ideas that have, hopefully, coalesced here. I am grateful to the rest of the UCR English Department, particularly the faculty and fellow students who I encountered in seminars and working groups, whose conversations sparked ideas and offered feedback. In particular, the other participants in the Book Arts program, both fellow English grads and the staff at the UCR Rivera Library, provided a fun and collegial environment for creative, intellectual collaboration. iv I must also acknowledge the indefatigable friendship of my grad school inner circle, Anne Sullivan, Sarah Lozier-Laiola, Ann Garascia, and Lorenzo Servitje. Without their humor, commiseration, professional generosity, and our ongoing group chat, I would have been a significantly sadder individual for the past few years. Anne Sullivan and Sarah Lozier-Laiola, in particular, were my roommates and comrades-in-arms in the year leading up to qualifying exams; they have been (and continue to be) the best friends a grad student could ask for. I am thankful, too, for the many conversations and friendships generated by conferences and research trips, particularly everyone who attended the NAVSA Professionalization Workshop in Venice and the brilliant women of my Chawton House cohort. On a more personal note, I am also indebted to the emotional support of my pub trivia team, the Trivial Pursuers: Rachel Katz, Matt Overstreet, Morgan Curtis, Alex Guttman, and Evyn Larson. For a few hours every week, we get together to laugh and argue and yell about popular culture over dinner and dessert. Thank you all. I am also thankful to Ashley Miller for her friendship and earnest conversations about the relationship of the humanities to the sciences. Finally, this dissertation could not have been written without the constant love and support of my parents, Bonnie and Gary. Not only have they proofread many different documents at the eleventh hour, they inspired and encouraged my love of literature my entire life. My father’s love of J.R.R. Tolkien, in particular, instilled in me early on a hunger for stories that has since taken its natural course. Though they may not have known what they were getting into, they have v patiently listened to every wandering discussion of my research and every anxious late- night thought. I owe them more than I can possibly articulate. Some material from Chapter 1 first appeared in the journal Victoriographies. This project was also aided by the generous support of a Chawton House Library Visiting Fellowship, as well as grants from the UCR English Department and the Graduate Student Association that allowed me to present this research around the world. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Entangled with the Dead: Burial, Exhumation, and Textual Materiality in British Romanticism by Jessica Anne Roberson Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2017 Dr. Adriana Craciun, Chairperson 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 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 thus makes visible the conceptual role of the grave as Romantic authors vii 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. viii Table of Contents Introduction…………………………………………………………………...1-25 Works Cited………………………………………………………….26-28 Chapter 1: Cultivating with the Dead: Poetry in the Ground and on the Page………......................................................................................................29-88 Works Cited…………………………………………………………..89-96 Chapter 2: Sea-Changed: Felicia Hemans and Burial at Sea ……………….97-133 Works Cited………………………………………………………..134-138 Chapter 3: Fossil Poetry: Thomas Lovell Beddoes and the Material Record……………………………………………………………………...139-179 Works Cited………………………………………………………..180-183 Chapter 4: Rates of Decay: Shelley’s The Last Man and Exhuming the Book………………………………………………………………………..184-226 Works Cited………………………………………………………..227-231 Epitaph: Romanticism and Bibliographic Fantasies……………………….232-256 Works Cited………………………………………………………..257-258 ix INTRODUCTION At the turn of the nineteenth century the category of the “literary dead” expands as Romantic authors begin to frame textual history along a newly-discovered material record. In the posthumously published landscape poem Beachy Head, for example, Charlotte Smith sketches a vision of Contemplation “bid[ding] recording Memory unfold / Her scroll voluminous,” revealing the history of the English coastline in the form of meticulously delineated botanical and fossil specimens (Smith 75). Beachy Head simultaneously highlights material texts (the scroll) and the testifying ability of natural “documents” like geographical features and fossils. Later in the poem, Smith turns from careful description of natural phenomenon to the additional presence of buried …remains of men, of whom is left No traces in the records of mankind, Save what these half obliterated mounds And half-fill’d trenches doubtfully impart To some lone antiquary; who on times remote, Since which two thousand years have