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LUTZ, DEBORAH. Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. 260 pp. $90.00 hardcover.
Deborah Lutz's fascinating Relics of Death in Victorian Literature and Culture explores how "the dead body's materiality held a certain enchantment for Victorians, a charmed ability to originate narrative" (1). She notes that Victorians "[saw] death, and the body itself, as a starting place for stories rather than their annihilation" (127). In her introduction, Lutz examines the Victorian culture of mourning, the rituals and gestures to remember the dead, and especially Victorians' penchant for imbuing relics, particularly corporeal remains, with significance.
Lutz's book is important both to literary and cultural studies, as she explores representations of bodies in nineteenth-century literature such as Dickens's novels and Tennyson's In Memoriam that influenced Victorian death culture, as well as "the literariness of remains" (2-3)-how we close read relics. Drawing largely on material culture criticism, Lutz cleverly engages with the place of relics in "thing theory" (following Elaine Freedgood), treating relics as Victorian texts to be interpreted and, conversely, poems and novels as relics. She also applies Walter Benjamin's "theory of the aura" to how Victorians found a sense of meaningful closeness to lost loved ones through objects once touched by the departed. Lutz builds on the scholarship of...