Writing Death and Absence in the Victorian Novel

Jolene Zigarovich is a research assistant professor in the Department of English at Claremont Graduate University.

• A Laboriously Constructed Skeleton': Retrospection, Absence and Obituary in Villette 'It sounds as hollow as a coffin': The Empty Tomb in Bleak House Wilkie Collins, Narrativity, and Epitaph Memorialization and Endlessness in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend Edwin Drood: The Seminal Missing Body

"A sustained and brilliant meditation on the deep intimacy between death and fiction-making. Death is distant, other, never truly our own, and accessible only as a representation the representation of the other's death as ours. Zigarovich's readings demonstrate how the novels of Brontë, Dickens, and Collins render anxieties about mortality inseparable from questions of language and representation, while remaining scrupulously attentive to the material culture out of which these narratives arose. This book contributes decisively to our understanding of the culture as well as the literature of the Victorian era." - Marc Redfield, professor of English and Comparative Literature, Brown University"Empty tombs, missing corpses, ghostly epitaphs, the rhetoric of loss these are some of the topics that Zigarovich explores with subtlety and theoretical sophistication in her fine study of major novels by Brontë, Dickens, and Collins." - John O. Jordan, professor of English, University of California, Santa Cruz'These wonderfully lively musings on the Victorian cult of death add significantly to the study of both an historical commonplace and of its uses in five exemplary novels.' - Edgar Rosenberg, Professor Emeritus, Cornell University