The Aesthetics of Post-Romantic and Post-Modernist Exhumation Fiction in English

This analysis explores the trope of exhumation in key English literary texts starting from the early nineteenth century onwards, going through Mary Shelley, James Hogg, Edgar Allan Poe, Christopher Isherwood, D. H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Jeffrey Eugenides, A. S. Byatt, and others. It examines the proximity between exhumation and the themes of rebirth and resurrection, illuminating the ways in which these tropes function as “epistemological quests” for the revelation of private and personal histories.