How to Do Things with Dead People : : History, Technology, and Temporality from Shakespeare to Warhol / / Alice Dailey.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2022
• VerfasserIn: Dailey, Alice,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2022]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (264 p.) :; 1 b&w photo, 19 color halftones

How to Do Things with Dead People studies human contrivances for representing and relating to the dead. Alice Dailey takes as her principal objects of inquiry Shakespeare's English history plays, describing them as reproductive mechanisms by which living replicas of dead historical figures are regenerated in the present and re-killed. Considering the plays in these terms exposes their affinity with a transhistorical array of technologies for producing, reproducing, and interacting with dead things—technologies like literary doppelgängers, photography, ventriloquist puppetry, X-ray imaging, glitch art, capital punishment machines, and cloning. By situating Shakespeare's historical drama in this intermedial conversation, Dailey challenges conventional assumptions about what constitutes the context of a work of art and contests foundational models of linear temporality that inform long-standing conceptions of historical periodization and teleological order. Working from an eclectic body of theories, pictures, and machines that transcend time and media, Dailey composes a searching exploration of how the living use the dead to think back and look forward, to rule, to love, to wish and create.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Luminous Spiral and the Cigarette Box, or Technologies of the Afterdeath -- 1. Little, Little Graves: Shakespeare’s Photographs of Richard II -- 2. Haunted Histories: Dramatic Double Exposure in Henry IV, Parts One and Two -- 3. Dummies and Doppelgängers: Performing for the Dead in 1 Henry VI -- 4. The King Machine: Reproducing Sovereignty in 3 Henry VI -- 5. Fuck Off and Die: The Queercrip Reign of Richard III -- Postscript: Lazarus Again -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index