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Cemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun: Literary Representations of Epitaph and Burial from the Nineteenth Century through the Great War

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2008, Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, English.
Cemetery Plots considers the rhetoric of burial reform, cemeterial customs, and epitaph writing in Great Britain from the mid-nineteenth century through the Great War. The first half of the dissertation studies mid- and late-Victorian responses to death and burial, including epitaph collections, burial reform documents, and fictional representations of burial and epitaph writing, especially in the novels of Charles Dickens. It traces expressions of cultural anxiety about individuality and the preservation of identity through an examination of Victorian mourning customs and literary representations of memorialization. The second half of the dissertation studies this same discourse of burial, epitaphs and mourning in the fiction, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, and poems produced in response to the First World War in order to understand how writings about individual memorialization changed in post-war British literature and culture. By examining how authors such as Charles Dickens, Ivor Gurney, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Virginia Woolf wrote about cemeteries, epitaphs, and burial practices, the dissertation demonstrates how the exaltation of individual identity in nineteenth-century memorialization practices gave way to an increasing skepticism about the delineation and preservation of individuality in the early twentieth century, as war writers altered and even disregarded Victorian notions of the individual when they wrote to remember. The Victorians' consumption of epitaphs, social novels, and reform documents like Edwin Chadwick's Sanitation Report provided the chance to develop new ideas about the individual, as well as mourning customs, social standing, and definitions of middle-class identity. By the time Woolf wrote Jacob's Room, however, the power and centrality of cemeteries and individual epitaphs had been called into question. Because of the Great War, writers had come to doubt the stability of both language and identity, and their fiction, poetry, and memoirs effectively challenged the ability of individualized burial practices, lengthy epitaphs, or other traditional forms of memorialization to capture the identity of the dead.
Athena Vrettos, PhD (Advisor)
Kurt Koenigsberger, PhD (Committee Member)
William Siebenschuh, PhD (Committee Member)
Renee Sentilles, PhD (Committee Member)
Roger Salomon, PhD (Other)
225 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Kichner, H. J. (2008). Cemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun: Literary Representations of Epitaph and Burial from the Nineteenth Century through the Great War [Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1212645077

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Kichner, Heather. Cemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun: Literary Representations of Epitaph and Burial from the Nineteenth Century through the Great War. 2008. Case Western Reserve University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1212645077.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Kichner, Heather. "Cemetery Plots from Victoria to Verdun: Literary Representations of Epitaph and Burial from the Nineteenth Century through the Great War." Doctoral dissertation, Case Western Reserve University, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=case1212645077

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)