Explores Victorian responses to death and burial in literature, journalism, and legal writing. Literary Remains explores the unexpectedly central role of death and burial in Victorian England. As Alan Ball, creator of HBO’s Six Feet Under, quipped, “Once you put a dead body in the room, you can talk about anything.” So, too, with the Victorians: dead bodies, especially their burial and cremation, engaged the passionate attention of leading Victorians, from sanitary reformers like Edwin Chadwick to bestselling novelists like Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, and Bram Stoker. Locating corpses at the center of an extensive range of concerns, including money and law, medicine and urban architecture, social planning and folklore, religion and national identity, Mary Elizabeth Hotz draws on a range of legal, administrative, journalistic, and literary writing to offer a thoughtful meditation on Victorian attitudes toward death and burial, as well as how those attitudes influenced present-day deathway practices. Literary Remains gives new meaning to the phrase that serves as its significant theme: “Taught by death what life should be.” “...Literary Remains is a fantastic literary companion and is worth reading even if you’re not initially interested in burial practices.” — M/C Reviews “ Hotz not only contextualizes her readings within a historical framework surrounding the passage of the Burial Acts, the building of large public cemeteries in the suburbs, and the late-century introduction of cremation as a widespread social practice, but offers a perceptive and compelling rhetorical analysis of the sociological, political, and theological discourse about burial.” — Victorian Studies “ the painstaking research on debates about funerary reform that Hotz brings together will be valuable for future investigations of death in Victorian culture.” — Studies in English Literature “This is an ambitious, energetic and rigorous attempt to do that very difficult thing, integrate detailed and historically informed analysis of the documents of nineteenth-century burial reform and of major literary texts into a lucid and complex argument that doesn’t fight shy of contradiction and difficulty.” — Mortality “Drawing on a vast range of primary sources—official documents, newspapers and periodicals, travel guides—and the work of anthropologists, historians, and the substantial engagements within literary studies dealing with representations of death and the dead, Hotz’s perceptive, engaging, and eloquent study will be welcomed by a range of scholars in the humanities and social sciences.” — CHOICE “I read this fascinating book with great pleasure. It makes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian practices of death and burial and will be an essential supplement to existing studies of the culture of Victorian melancholy and bereavement.” — Joel Faflak, author of Romantic Psychoanalysis: The Burden of the Mystery

Lu Xun (1881–1936), arguably twentieth-century China’s greatest writer, is commonly cast in the mold of a radical iconoclast who vehemently rejected traditional culture. The contradictions and ambivalence so central to his writings, however, are often overlooked. Challenging conventional depictions, Eileen J. Cheng’s innovative readings capture Lu Xun’s disenchantment with modernity and his transformative engagements with traditional literary conventions in his “modern” experimental works. Lurking behind the ambiguity at the heart of his writings are larger questions on the effects of cultural exchange, accommodation, and transformation that Lu Xun grappled with as a writer: How can a culture estranged from its vanishing traditions come to terms with its past? How can a culture, severed from its roots and alienated from the foreign conventions it appropriates, conceptualize its own present and future? Literary Remains shows how Lu Xun’s own literary encounter with the modern involved a sustained engagement with the past. His creative writings—which imitate, adapt, and parody traditional literary conventions—represent and mirror the trauma of cultural disintegration, in content and in form. His contradictory, uncertain, and at times bizarrely incoherent narratives refuse to conform to conventional modes of meaning making or teleological notions of history, opening up imaginative possibilities for comprehending the past and present without necessarily reifying them. Behind Lu Xun’s “refusal to mourn,” that is, his insistence on keeping the past and the dead alive in writing, lies an ethical claim: to recover the redemptive meaning of loss. Like a solitary wanderer keeping vigil at the site of destruction, he sifts through the debris, composing epitaphs to mark both the presence and absence of that which has gone before and will soon come to pass. For in the rubble of what remains, he recovered precious gems of illumination through which to assess, critique, and transform the moment of the present. Literary Remains shows how Lu Xun’s literary enterprise is driven by a “radical hope”—that, in spite of the destruction he witnessed and the limits of representation, his writings, like the texts that inspired his own, might somehow capture glimmers of the past and the present, and illuminate a future yet to unfold. Literary Remains will appeal to a wide audience of students and scholars interested in Lu Xun, modern China, cultural studies, and world literature.

Excerpt from Remains Historical Literary Connected With the Palatine Counties of Lancaster and Chester, Vol. 31: Published by the Chetham Society Henry Earl of Derby had his Council, which embraced some of the nobility, the Bishop, and a large body of the superior Clergy of the Diocese, besides the principal gentle men of the two palatine counties. The powers vested in this Council were not dissimilar to those of the Privy Coun cil of the sovereign, and not only were statutes enforced and laws carried into effect, but regulations and ordinances of the most stringent and occasionally of the most arbitrary character were enacted, affecting the liberties as well as the property of individuals. Like the Queen, the Earl of Derby had his Comptroller and Steward of the Household, his Grooms of the Bedchamber, and Clerks of the Kitchen and the eldest sons of independent gentlemen of the first rank in the county deemed it an honourable distinction to wait in private upon his Lordship at his table, and in public to wear the badge of his livery. There was nothing servile in their employment, and therefore nothing ignominious in it, the nobility themselves contending for similar situations in the royal household. The three principal offices in the establishment were filled by individuals of knightly rank, connected with the family either by descent or by marriage, some of whose ancestors had hazarded their lives in the campaigns of Agincourt and engaged in the wars of the Roses, whilst their immediate predecessors had shared in the well-earned glories of F lod den and had returned unscathed from the wars of Scotland. These. Officers of the Earl had the privilege of applying to their own use, probably in their own domestic establish ments, a certain number of his Lordship's servants, wearing his livery, and whose wages and clothes were supplied by him. They had also horses kept for their convenience, and their high rank was duly recognised in the household. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.