{"title":"‘A Task enough to make one frantic’: William Hayley’s Memorialising","authors":"L. Gee","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36899","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36899","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores Hayley’s approach to, and writing about, memorialising, focusing on his manuscript collection of epitaphs, his letters to Anna Seward about her epitaph on Lady Miller, and his memoirs and biographies. How typical was he of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century memorialists? What does his writing about death—and his writing about writing about death—tell us about how his contemporaries were supposed to feel and express their feelings about the dead? How do his works illustrate what he and his contemporaries were expected to reveal or conceal about the dead, and about the living? How different, in that respect, were the works designed to be read by the public from those intended only for the deceased’s nearest and dearest? How did the author’s death change the expected readership?","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121362757","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Boy’s Own Trauma: Revisiting a Photograph Recorded in a Nazi Concentration Camp First Encountered as a Child","authors":"Roelof Bakker","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36907","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36907","url":null,"abstract":"Photographer Roelof Bakker revisits a George Rodger photograph recorded in a Nazi concentration camp, Bakker first encountered as a child growing up in the Netherlands forty years ago. Finally developing this image, which registered in his mind yet remained unprocessed, Bakker actively engages with the photograph as a photographer, investigator and spectator, but also as a human being, integrating thought and feeling into an ethical and responsible process of analysis. Responding to critical texts by Ariella Azoulay, Ulrich Baer, Susie Linfield, Werner Sollors, and others, Bakker looks beyond the photograph as a static object, addressing the other participants in the photographic act, including the photographer’s subject Sieg Maandag, and connecting the photograph to a world outside its frame, towards a future unknown at the time of exposure.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126505203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Obituaries: A Dead Important Genre","authors":"C. Brant","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36909","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36909","url":null,"abstract":"Obituaries are micro-narratives in which distinct conventions and tensions are at work. Humanist and historical, emotional and dispassionate, philosophical and random, obituaries have a literary nexus that encompasses reverence, irreverence, grief and (in some cases) relief. My analysis starts with broadsheet obituaries of the late twentieth century, and models of reading the genre, which I re-read through counter-establishment Private Eye’s comic verse obituaries. Pet memorials adopt and adapt obituary, creating distinct subcultures of animal relations in genres of human mourning. The obituaries discussed span the ideological reproduction of essentially respectful obituaries, to comedy’s counter-cultural critique, to an expansive embrace of selected animal companions seen as part of human families, to an articulation of the value of life forms lost to climate emergency. In these and other contexts, obituaries are alive and well.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131923971","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Un-earthing the Eighteenth-Century Churchyard: Charlotte Smith’s Life Writing Among the Dead","authors":"James Metcalf","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36900","url":null,"abstract":"The work of poet and novelist Charlotte Smith (1749–1806) has been consistently associated with life writing through the successive revelations of her autobiographical paratexts. While the life of the author is therefore familiar, Smith’s contribution to the relationship between life writing and death has been less examined. Several of her novels and poems demonstrate an awareness of and departure from the tropes of mid-eighteenth-century ‘graveyard poetry’. Central among these is the churchyard, and through this landscape Smith revises the literary community of the ‘graveyard school’ but also its conventional life writing of the dead. Reversing the recuperation of the dead through religious, familial, or other compensations common to elegies, epitaphs, funeral sermons, and ‘graveyard poetry’, Smith unearths merely decaying corpses; in doing so she re-writes the life of the dead and re-imagines the life of living communities that have been divested of the humic foundations the idealised, familiar, localised dead provide. Situated in the context of churchyard literature and the churchyard’s long history of transmortal relationships, this article argues that Smith’s sonnet ‘Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton in Sussex’ (1789) intervenes in the reclamation of the dead through life writing to interrogate what happens when these consolatory processes are eroded.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128364974","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Written Out of Life: The Death of Keith Vaughan and his Journal","authors":"Alex Belsey","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36908","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36908","url":null,"abstract":"When the British painter Keith Vaughan (1912–77) ingested a lethal cocktail of barbiturates, having made the decision to end his life after a long struggle with cancer, there was only one thing left to do: write one final entry in his journal, the lifelong literary account he had commenced in 1939 and maintained ever since. Vaughan’s journal is an extraordinary document, its 61 volumes spanning 38 years of impassioned ideas and personal development from his difficult wartime years as a conscientious objector through his post-war life as a successful but troubled artist. This paper focuses on the final volume of Vaughan’s journal, commenced in August 1975 and ending on the morning of 4 November 1977. It considers how Vaughan used journal-writing at a time of great suffering to reflect upon his life and his reasons for leaving it. By revealing the crucial role that Vaughan’s final volume played in justifying that his life had ceased to have forward momentum or meaning, this paper argues for the close relationship between the practice of journal-writing and questions of futurity, positing Vaughan as an exemplary author-subject who uses diary or journal forms to postulate a potential future and their relationship to it.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134242842","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Charles Dickens Post Mortem & Bare Life under the New Poor Law","authors":"R. Richardson","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36901","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36901","url":null,"abstract":"The theme of this article is how life writing can bury things, sometimes for generations, and how secrets buried in life can re-emerge after death, and disturb.1 Lives often make best sense read backwards, so here we start with revelations that emerged only after Charles Dickens’s death: in his will, and in John Forster’s famous biography and its use of the important document known as the ‘autobiographical fragment’ written by Dickens himself in the late 1840s. Forster covered gaps in the biography by guiding attention away from certain aspects of Dickens’s life, in particular his family’s geographical origins. Forster’s decisions concerning what secrets could be shared have worked to influence generations of biographers. Recent discoveries have brought fresh light to Dickens’s life after both Dickens and Forster had been dead for over a century. Attention is given to why some of these discoveries had not been made sooner, their implications and reverberations, and a fuller understanding is shared of Dickens’s fierce antipathy to the cruelties of the workhouse regime under the UK New Poor Law.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"26 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132090571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oriri ex cinere","authors":"Spring Hurlbut","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36914","url":null,"abstract":"In Oriri ex cinere (rising from the ashes), artist Spring Hurlbut recounts the inspiration and process behind the photographic and video work she has created using cremated human and animal ashes. Hurlbut’s lines, quadrilaterals and circles of ash have an integrity of form that keeps them whole and intact, and another force that dissipates their structure, suggestive of the dissolution that ultimately affects all living forms. Her video, Airborne, shows ashes of named individuals emerging from black boxes and riding the air currents in a dance involving the movements of the living and the vestiges of the dead. Hurlbut draws attention to the reality of death that is generally cloistered in our society. Through her activation of human and animal ashes, she gives the dead a chance to engage once again with life.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122699482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Revisiting the Churchyard","authors":"James Metcalf","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36919","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36919","url":null,"abstract":"The churchyard has always been a site of pilgrimage. The remains of the dead, sanctified as holy relics, conferred a hallowed status on their location in the earth; this, in turn, became a destination for travellers. By the eighteenth century, ‘pilgrims’ consciously mapped their interest in literary remains onto these sacred spaces, drawing their pursuit of literary tourism into a long history of travel to the realms of the venerated dead. Using a series of photographs, I retrace my churchyard pilgrimages in London and Thomas Gray’s Stoke Poges, reflecting on the context of thanatourism and thinking about the ways in which the places of the dead—chief among them the churchyard—still mean today.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"146 6","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132467668","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Death in a Nutshell: Frances Glessner Lee’s ‘Nutshell Studies in Unexplained Death’","authors":"C. Brant","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36936","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36936","url":null,"abstract":"Frances Glessner Lee’s miniature models of murder scenes are tiny marvels of making. They are durable teaching aids in forensic science, and have attracted biographical and poetic attention. What is their interest for life writing, and why?","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116765183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Youthful Death and Melancholia: The Case of Rupert and Mary Brooke","authors":"Alisa Miller","doi":"10.21827/ejlw.9.36906","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21827/ejlw.9.36906","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers how Mary Brooke, the mother of the poet-soldier Rupert Brooke, managed her mourning and melancholia in the wake of the death of her sons in the First World War. It briefly considers how Brooke’s death and poetry framed and, to some extent, predicted his popularity during and after the war. It goes on to explore how Mary Brooke constructed lasting literary and physical monuments to her son, which reframed his public life narrative and reflected her own culturally ingrained philosophical and aesthetic preferences. It examines how her experience reflects established and changing practices with respect to women and public death, and the elements that made her case exceptional. Finally, it places her story in the wider history of European melancholia as it relates to war, grief and creative expression.","PeriodicalId":263826,"journal":{"name":"The European Journal of Life Writing","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122648504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}