Narrative Mourning

"Oliver’s study represents a fascinating and welcome addition to eighteenth-century literary studies. Considering the novel of sensibility and the gothic novel in relation to death, Narrative Mourning addresses contemporary beliefs about death, the dead body, the soul, and the material objects associated with death. Oliver explores relics—objects such as waxen transi and hair jewelry—and relicts—the people left behind after a death occurs. Throughout, she offers a number of insightful readings, from the high body count of David Simple and its sequel, to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison with the mock-widow and pseudo-ghost Clementina della Porretta, to the haunting narrative strategies of The Man of Feeling."

"With its extensive close readings of both the novel of sensibility and the Gothic novel, Kathleen M. Oliver’s Narrative Mourning: Death and Its Relics in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel compellingly argues for the cultural disappearance of the dead in its lucid examination of relics and relicts in fictional representations of death and loss. Its distinctive focus on objects, persons, and ghosts offers a fascinating and well-needed study of the role of melancholy and mourning in the eighteenth-century novel."

"'Death and loss haunt the eighteenth-century British novel,'" writes Kathleen M. Oliver in her compelling study, Narrative Mourning. From Clarissa Harlowe's mourning rings to her own corpse in Clarissa; from portraits to wax effigies in The Mysteries of Udolpho; from relics to relicts in David Simple, Volume the Last, and Grandison; from torn manuscript to lively spectral narrator in The Man of Feeling, Oliver's careful readings limn the dynamic 'lives' of eighteenth-century literary remains."

"[Narrative Mourning's] clearly marked conclusions...eloquently and often lyrically summarize the concerns of each chapter and section while signposting the more difficult arguments in the interest of accessibility."

“In her conclusion, Oliver helpfully elides the differences between the novel of sensibility and the gothic novel, and thus participates in a useful reconsideration of the two kinds of fiction at the end of the eighteenth century as part and parcel of one literary movement. Human death and the relics/relicts that are created, as well as our relationship to them, become dynamic rather than static throughout Oliver’s study. This contribution to how we read the eighteenth-century novel and how we reconsider the cult of sensibility in England will continue to have relevance for many years to come.”