Between Life and Death

Recent work in eighteenth-century studies has asked scholars of the period to reevaluate the concept of mediation, broadly defined in its connections to both media and communication. ¹ Mediation is especially relevant to studies of eighteenth-century prose fiction; it could be the responsibility of a narrator, as in Tom Jones, or be present in any number of prefaces to novels, as in The Castle of Otranto. ² One character who functions as a spiritual and textual mediator in novels is the religious intercessor. Representations of the intercessor figure, although pertinent to understanding mediation in the novel and in eighteenth-century studies, have yet to be explored fully. Michael Warner describes “the media culture of evangelical preaching” in an eighteenth-century Protestant context, but Catholicism, the novel, and Gothic literature offer their own perspectives on Enlightenment mediation. ³