The Living Death of Modernity

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Living-dead characters appear surprisingly often in the realist works of Balzac and Zola, and in the modern poetry of Baudelaire. In this era of industrialization and modernization, images of the living dead disrupt this state of the new and make visible the impossibility of erasing the past. A skeleton that communicates with a character during a shopping trip, a body taken over by a past ancestor, a ghost that haunts through the floorboards, or a more symbolic dead heart -- living death takes many shapes. In readings of these authors, Dorothy Kelly, who has written extensively on the literature of this period, charts the various ways that this image permeates certain works of these three authors and the meanings that it generates.

Dorothy Kelly is Professor of French at Boston University.