How to Do Things with Dead People

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies such as literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning.

By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.

Alice Dailey is Professor of English at Villanova University. She is the author of The English Martyr from Reformation to Revolution.

In Alice Dailey's provocative and probing study, the dead inhabit a liminal space she calls afterdeath. This space has found its chief geographers in Shakespeare and Warhol. Dailey reframes their words and images to illuminate queer crossings across media and technologies of time. How to Do Things with Dead People is a moving critical study of love and grief, life and death, onstage and off.

Melissa E. Sanchez, author of Queer Faith and Shakespeare and Queer Theory:

How to Do Things with Dead People will be one of the most important books of the decade. Alice Dailey boldly traverses the methodological and hermeneutic boundaries that can impose artificial limits on the possibilities of much scholarship, and she utterly persuades us of 'the imperative of thinking strangely' as both an ethical and an intellectual matter. This book raises the bar for rigorous, creative, and humane scholarship.

Phyllis Rackin, author of Stages of History and Shakespeare and Women:

This book is essential reading for students of Shakespeare's English chronicle plays, but it is much more than that. In addition to showing us radically new ways to think about those plays, Alice Dailey calls into question both the entire project of historicist literary study and the concept of time as a linear progression that subtends it.