Fall 2025 Colloquium - Renee Fox

Literature, UC Santa Cruz

Title: Reanimating the Dead in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract: From the late 18th century, when public experiments with galvanism became sensational spectacles for British audiences, to the late 19th century when electrical devices became quack cures for fading vitality, British poets and novelists fantasized about the possibilities and perils of electricity bringing the dead to life. This talk explores the literal and metaphorical acts of reanimation that emerge in gothic novels, nationalist poems, dramatic monologues, philosophical satires, and even realist fictions, arguing that 19th-century writers used the language of electricity to scrutinize the historical, aesthetic, and ethical value of corpses living again in the present moment.