Staff/Postgraduate Research Seminar: ' From Epitaph to Obituary: The Forlorn Hic Jacet and the Romantic Writer,' by Dr Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick)

This paper will investigate the decline of the literary epitaph, and the concomitant rise of the newspaper obituary in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Europe.

It will explore the aesthetic and ethical debate over literary responses to death engaged in by writers such as Gray, Foscolo, Johnson, Wordsworth and Hazlitt. In particular, the question is raised of how far it is important that the words of the epitaph have what Wordsworth called a "close connection to the bodily remains of the deceased". What changes when the literary epitaph leaves the "mouldering grave" and takes a mobile and transmissible form? Aesthetic questions also mask political ones. How far does death offer an "all-uniting and all-universalising" perspective, as Wordsworth suggests?

The paper reflects on these questions in the context of the sociological history of death offered by scholars such as Philippe Aries, Jean-Didier Urbain and Armando Petrucci, and considers the wider significance of the epitaph and obituary in terms of national identity, politics and community.

Contact ulrika.maude@durham.ac.uk for more information about this event.