Table Of ContentPALGRAVE STUDIES IN LITERATURE,
SCIENCE AND MEDICINE
Life, Death,
and Consciousness
in the Long
Nineteenth Century
Edited by
Lucy Cogan
Michelle O’Connell
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
Series Editors
Sharon Ruston
Department of English and Creative Writing
Lancaster University
Lancaster, UK
Alice Jenkins
School of Critical Studies
University of Glasgow
Glasgow, UK
Jessica Howell
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX, USA
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine is an exciting series
that focuses on one of the most vibrant and interdisciplinary areas in liter-
ary studies: the intersection of literature, science and medicine. Comprised
of academic monographs, essay collections, and Palgrave Pivot books, the
series will emphasize a historical approach to its subjects, in conjunction
with a range of other theoretical approaches. The series will cover all
aspects of this rich and varied field and is open to new and emerging topics
as well as established ones.
Editorial board:
Andrew M. Beresford, Professor in the School of Modern Languages and
Cultures, Durham University, UK
Steven Connor, Professor of English, University of Cambridge, UK
Lisa Diedrich, Associate Professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, Stony
Brook University, USA
Kate Hayles, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Jessica Howell, Associate Professor of English, Texas A&M University, USA
Peter Middleton, Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK
Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Professor of English and Theatre Studies, University
of Oxford, UK
Sally Shuttleworth, Professorial Fellow in English, St Anne’s College,
University of Oxford, UK
Susan Squier, Professor of Women’s Studies and English, Pennsylvania State
University, USA
Martin Willis, Professor of English, University of Westminster, UK
Karen A. Winstead, Professor of English, The Ohio State University, USA
Lucy Cogan • Michelle O’Connell
Editors
Life, Death, and
Consciousness in the
Long Nineteenth
Century
Editors
Lucy Cogan Michelle O’Connell
NUI Galway University College Dublin
Galway, Ireland Dublin, Ireland
ISSN 2634-6435 ISSN 2634-6443 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine
ISBN 978-3-031-13362-6 ISBN 978-3-031-13363-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13363-3
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A
cknowledgements
This collection had its origins in the international conference “In Extremis:
The Limits of Life Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth
Century,” which was held at University College Dublin (UCD) in early
January 2020. Little did we know how much was to change in the months
that followed. The world after that point demonstrated the precarious
interdependence of human life, social structures, ideology, and global sta-
bility, echoing the connections discussed in this volume.
The two-day conference was stimulating, rewarding, and started many
conversations and connections that have stayed with us. We are grateful to
all of the contributors, in particular our keynote speaker, Angela Wright,
who set the tone for the conference with her wonderful presentation on
Mary Shelley. We are grateful to all of our contributors for engaging with
us, sharing their work and creating a vibrant atmosphere of scholarship
and camaraderie on a cold January weekend in Dublin. We are grateful too
to the many colleagues who contributed so much to the planning and
organisation of the conference, including those who attended, and con-
tributed papers: John Brannigan, Andrew Carpenter, Nick Daly, Dara
Downey, Fionnuala Dillane, Niamh Pattwell, Rebecca Stephenson, Maria
Stuart, and Leanne Waters. We are grateful too to Pauline Slattery, Karen
Jackman, Stacy Grouden, and Ryan Dorrian, who were invaluable in help-
ing us to prepare for and run the conference. The conference and this
collection were guided into being under the auspices of the UCD research
theme “Health, Medicine and Wellbeing,” and we are grateful to the
Theme Lead, Catherine Cox, for her stewardship of this research strand.
We would also mostly particularly like to thank University College Dublin
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
for the award of a seed-funding grant that enabled us to hold the “In
Extremis” conference, and without which this project would not have
been possible.
We are grateful to all of our contributors to this volume of essays, for
putting their work in our hands, and for the time and energy they have
expended in their contributions, and for their engagement with us through
every step of the process.
Throughout the preparation of this volume, family, friends, and col-
leagues offered unfailing wisdom, expertise, and support. Special thanks
are due to Porscha Fermanis, Sarah Comyn, Nigel Baker, Richard Tolan,
Susan Tolan, Deborah Russell, Ciara Durnin, Fiona Brugha, Laura Kirkley,
Rebecca Anne Barr, Alice Maugher, Lauren Arrington, Nerys Williams,
Meiko O’Halloran, Kathy Doyle, Mary Denise Lyons, Isabel Cogan,
Agnes Cogan, Niall O’Connell, and Mairéad O’Connell, and to Bess who
is the best.
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Testing the Boundaries of Being in the
Long Nineteenth Century 1
Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell
Part I The Limits of Life 29
2 Drunkenness, Compulsion, and the Disintegration of the
Self: Erasmus Darwin’s Theory of Ebrietas in the Writings
of Maria Edgeworth 31
Lucy Cogan
3 Intersex Boundaries: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-
Century Hermaphroditic Bodies 55
Jolene Zigarovich
4 The Catheter Life: a Social History of Ageing, Risk, and
Surgical Innovation in Britain’s Long Nineteenth Century 89
Kieran Fitzpatrick
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II Death’s Embrace 117
5 He Does Not Suffer Now: Death and Citizenship
in the National Tale 119
Matthew L. Reznicek
6 “Thy paleness makes me glad”: Death, Sympathy,
and the Body in Keats’s Isabella 139
Greta Colombani
7 Poe In Extremis 165
Robert Miles
Part III The Veil of Consciousness 183
8 “[T]o Feel Powers at Work in the Common Air Unfelt
by Others”: Receptivity and the Vanishing Body in
Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture 185
Greta Perletti
9 Grasping Spiritualists and Besotted Scientists: The
Female Medium’s Body as Battleground 215
Dara Downey
10 Consequential Madness: Gender and Power in
Romantic-Period Madhouse Literature 235
Deborah Russell
11 Wandering Attention: Victorian Daydreaming,
Disembodiment, and the Boundaries of Consciousness 255
Athena Vrettos
Index 275
n c
otes on ontributors
Lucy Cogan is Lecturer in English (Long-Eighteenth Century) at NUI
Galway and her research interests include radical Romanticism, women’s
writing in the long eighteenth century and Medical Humanities. She has
published a monograph on William Blake entitled Blake and the Failure of
Prophecy (2021) and a range of articles and essays on gender and sexuality
in Blake’s writing, and on women’s writing in the long eighteenth century.
Her forthcoming second monograph Drunkenness in Eighteenth and
Nineteenth-Century Irish Literature will be the first full-length study on
the subject, tracking depictions of drunkenness in Irish literature from
Jonathan Swift to Bram Stoker alongside global trends in medical atti-
tudes towards drunkenness.
Greta Colombani is an AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of
Cambridge, where she is writing a dissertation on communication with
the Other World in British Romantic poetry. She previously completed her
studies at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Pisa and she
is the author of A Gordian Shape of Dazzling Hue: Serpent Symbolism in
Keats’s Poetry (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017). Her research interests
focus on British nineteenth-century literature—in particular Romanticism,
Gothic literature, and the supernatural—and on applications of literary
theory and communication theory to textual analysis.
Dara Downey lectures in American Literature in University College
Dublin and tutors on the Trinity Access Programme in Trinity College
Dublin. Her research focuses on domesticity in supernatural American
popular culture, and she is currently writing a literary biography of Shirley
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