The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature by Renée Fox (review)

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• The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature by Renée Fox
• Leslie S. Simon (bio)

Renée Fox. The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature. Ohio State UP, 2023. Pp. x + 267. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-8142-1549-4 (hb).

Tucked into a long and deeply satisfying chapter on Dickensian realisms, in her incisive new study of the nineteenth-century historical imagination, The Necromantics: Reanimation, the Historical Imagination, and Victorian British and Irish Literature, Renée Fox utters two almost throwaway statements that caught my attention. In the first, writing of Pip in Great Expectations (1860–61), Fox tells us in a parenthetical aside: “I won’t deny him his moral redemption – he’s clearly less of an asshole in his middle age than he is in his youth” (94). Later in the chapter, analyzing zombie-like figures in Our Mutual Friend (1864–65) like Lizzie Hexam and Jenny Wren, Fox writes with feeling, “And god help those poor characters, all they want is to be allowed to be dead” (106). In the one instance, I shattered the quiet of my office with laughter; in the other, tears sprang unbidden to my eyes. In both, I felt a visceral engagement with the analysis, as Fox raised the specters of Dickens’s characters in full and fleshy form – “alive again bodies,” as she would say (8) – and bid me look at them anew.

These two comments themselves have little bearing on the overall argument of the chapter, which posits a logistically complex interpretation of “epitaphic” and “zombie” realisms in the novels, but – to my mind – they model the kind of reading The Necromantics explicitly calls for, what Fox terms “resuscitative reading.” This method takes its cue from history as a discipline, which she says “exhumes, renews, resuscitates; … disintegrates distinctions between past and present; … brings back the dead as people” (15). Indeed, Fox imagines historians – and literary readers, by extension – less as time-travelers than as resurrectionists: rather than imagining ourselves backward into the past through acts of reading, we “resurrect the dead in the present moment,” thereby “giving the dead [like Pip and Jenny Wren] a second life in the present” and “making the past matter now” (15).

Her approach draws heavily upon recent studies in presentism, including Rita Felski’s work on “postcritical reading,” which underscores the “dynamic interaction between reader and text” (11); Fox charts this relation upon a timeline – text/past, reader/present – and urges us to understand our reading as an historical act, one that pulls the past into the present (not vice [End Page 120] versa). According to Fox, the ultimate directive of resuscitative reading is to heartily engage the tension embedded in this historical transaction – in which we exhume old characters, settings, and storylines, and interpret them through a modern lens – and not ignore it: we must acknowledge the ways in which “our subjective energies fundamentally act upon materials with which we interact” (12) and allow those energies (like calling Pip an asshole as if he’s a person we might bump into at work tomorrow) to “give texts an experimental jolt, to push them to their limits by creatively remembering” them (12). The two lines of text that jumped out at me offer just this kind of jolt because they unapologetically display a very human, very presentist response to the novels; it is, as Fox writes, “our job as readers and critics to give the old bones we excavate new life” (12).

Here is the simple and startling claim that sits at the heart of The Necromantics: the question of presentism that has engrossed nineteenth-century studies scholars for the better part of a decade – how we give the old bones we excavate new life and what the ethics of that gift are and whether it is a gift at all – engrossed the very writers whose works we study. The Victorians were presentists too, inquiring through their own writing “whether presentism deforms or makes new shapes; whether historicism deadens or revives; whether the two are distinct from one another or whether presentism simply represents a creative attentiveness to historicism’s...