Review: The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature, by Renée Fox Available to Purchase

The subject of reanimation touches on some of the most significant theological questions facing the Victorians, as the “crisis of faith” (whatever multiple interpretations that contested term is subject to) forced so many of them to think through the implications of Christian beliefs. Renée Fox’s often exhilarating and frequently vertiginous new study of fantastically varied treatments of reanimation in British and Irish culture across the long nineteenth century argues that history rather than theology was the force behind much of this rumination on rebirth and recreation. In seven dense, darkly humorous, and insightful chapters Fox tracks down the walking, talking corpses of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend, Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book, W. B. Yeats’s “The Wanderings of Oisin,” and Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars. While for the most part the book deals with the canonical...