Insult to Injury: Romantic Wartime and the Desecrated Corpse. Issue 3 (4th May 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Clark, David L.
• Is Part Of: European romantic review. Volume 30:Issue 3(2019)
• Page Start: 275
• Page End: 285
• Publication Date: 2019-05-04
• Subjects: Romanticism -- Europe -- Periodicals; European literature -- 18th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Europe -- History -- 1789-1900 -- Periodicals; European literature -- 19th century -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; 809.9145
• DOI: 10.1080/10509585.2019.1612587
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1050-9585

Abstract

ABSTRACT: As a propaedeutic towards what I want eventually to call "a theory of the corpse, " my essay briefly considers images of Romantic remains—in particular, figures of desecrated, diminished, scorned, heaped, abandoned, unburied, forgotten, and otherwise ill-served and instrumentalized bodies of the war dead. Examining the figure of desecrated corpses in Jacques-Louis David, Sir Charles Bell, J. W. Turner, Jane Austen, and Felicia Hemans, I argue that the war dead pose unique challenges to historical knowledge and memory, and to the very concept of representation. The image of the marred corpse, I suggest, captures key features of the social and aesthetic derangements of Romantic war.