Manchester University Press
5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship
Abstract
Ruins are as endemic to the modern as Gothic. Gothic graveyards are and should be organic, living repositories, characterised, positively, by impermanence and slow ruin. Thus, efforts to preserve, conserve and renovate can, paradoxically, disrupt important individual and communal connections with the dead. To erase or destroy those spaces, with their ruins and relics, is to effectively erase or destroy important social and cultural bonds. The Victorians had their destructive improvers; the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has commercial developers and a gentrifying heritage industry. In this chapter I examine how, at specific historical moments, graveyard ruins and relics – official and unofficial, textual and visual, material and imaginative – facilitated certain kinds of vital encounters between the dead and the living.
Abstract
Ruins are as endemic to the modern as Gothic. Gothic graveyards are and should be organic, living repositories, characterised, positively, by impermanence and slow ruin. Thus, efforts to preserve, conserve and renovate can, paradoxically, disrupt important individual and communal connections with the dead. To erase or destroy those spaces, with their ruins and relics, is to effectively erase or destroy important social and cultural bonds. The Victorians had their destructive improvers; the late twentieth and early twenty-first century has commercial developers and a gentrifying heritage industry. In this chapter I examine how, at specific historical moments, graveyard ruins and relics – official and unofficial, textual and visual, material and imaginative – facilitated certain kinds of vital encounters between the dead and the living.
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
Chapters in this book
- Front Matter i
- Dedication v
- Contents vii
- List of figures ix
- List of contributors xi
- Acknowledgements xv
- Introduction 1
- 1 The Gothic churchyard in graveyard poetry 18
- 2 Graveyard pleasures 32
- 3 The last days of the urban burial ground 47
- 4 De-Gothicising the Victorian Gothic graveyard 61
- 5 Relics and ruins, photographs and fellowship 77
- 6 The colonial Australian Gothic and the grave 96
- 7 Weirding the Gothic graveyard 111
- 8 Graveyards in Western Gothic cinema 125
- 9 The ventriloquised corpse and the silent dead 140
- 10 Home among the headstones 155
- 11 The graveyard in neo-Edwardian fiction 169
- 12 Unstable coordinates 183
- 13 Conversations with spectres 196
- 14 Monsters of history 208
- 15 Indian burial grounds in American fiction and film 223
- 16 Adolescent existence and resistance 238
- 17 The graveyard level 252
- Coda 268
- Index 279
