ABSTRACT
Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from the rapidly expanding field of thanatology studies, this chapter explains how other cultural factors and intellectual developments in the domains of theology, science, and philosophy, ranging beyond the socio-historical realities referenced by Parisot, fueled the era's death fixation. As the trinity of death-centered literary forms considered illustrate the elegy, graveyard poetry, and the Gothic novel the Enlightenment/Romantic era that ran from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century was a period of major transition in regard to social attitudes toward death. By examining the Gothic in relation to death, dying, mourning, and memorialization especially in its symbolic negotiations toward a new social contract between the living and dead the author explain how the Gothic registered a post-Enlightenment, religiously inflected cultural epistemology about death that formed part of the modern secular order. Death and relationships between the dead and the living were primary topics of inquiry in Enlightenment discourse, especially in works of theological and sociopolitical cast.
